A Rocker at the Symphony
With more than fifty years in the music industry, most of them spent in rehearsal rooms and rock venues and pushing a pen I have not often stepped into the world of the symphony orchestra. The Ku-ring-gai Philharmonic Orchestra (KPO) reminded me last weekend of what I have been missing.
The stage was filled with musicians, an impressive sight in itself. Their tuning had a strangely familiar quality, a wash of sound not unlike the opening chaos of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
Conductor Paul Terracini opened the evening with Paul Nicolaou’s Of Gates No Longer Known, followed by Beethoven’s Violin Concerto. The soloist, Teresa Yang, made a striking impression. Elegantly poised, she brought both technical assurance and emotional nuance to the concerto. Performing without a score, she gave the work an immediacy and intimacy that drew the audience in. Her performance was greeted with a warm and enthusiastic ovation.
After the interval, the orchestra turned to Richard Strauss’s Thus Spake Zarathustra, a work etched into popular memory as the theme from 2001: A Space Odyssey. Under Terracini’s direction, the KPO delivered it with thrilling power: brass blazing, percussion resounding, and Strauss’s vast sonic landscape unfolding with conviction. It was music that felt at once familiar and newly alive.
For someone whose ears have long been tuned to amplifiers and guitars, the sheer scale and colour of the symphony orchestra was a revelation. The KPO offered not only precision but passion, reminding me and surely many others in the hall of the unique power of orchestral music to move and inspire.
Playing at The Concourse Concert Hall, Chatswood on August 31, 2025 at 3PM
https://www.kpo.org.au/current/
Reviewed by Mick Martin