2024: Firsts and Favourites

Semra Lee, Assistant Concertmaster

2024 is a bumper year for fabulous concerts - there are so many to choose from. As a violinist, I can’t go past our Concertmaster Laurence Jackson playing Elgar’s Violin Concerto and Karen Gomyo who returns to play Barber’s Violin Concerto which has an absolute firecracker of a last movement. I’m also really looking forward to working with Umberto Clerici again whose musicianship I admire greatly and is hilarious during rehearsals.  As an added bonus, in the same concert, Perth's very own Matt Styles is premiering a Saxophone Concerto by Holly Harrison.

Another premiere I’m looking forward to is James Ledger’s The Last Thing. James is a great friend and I love his music. In the same concert is Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony so for me, this concert is unmissable.

Finally, WASO’s newly appointed Associate Conductor Jen Winley is conducting an exciting concert that features our brilliant Jenna Smith in Hummel’s Trumpet Concerto and the absolutely gorgeous Scheherazade by Rimsky-Korsakov.

John Keene, Associate Principal Double Bass

Next year I’m looking forward to Mahler 8 purely because of the rarity of the piece being programmed, and its incredible enormity and grandeur in both sound and personnel required. I’m also really looking forward to the Spring Fest Brahms and Mozart concerts later in the year - both composers are favourites of mine because they’re always so fun to play and feature excellent bass parts.

Aside from that, Ein Heldenleben by Strauss is a favourite (mostly because it's a famously difficult excerpt that many bass players study at university!) and I'm looking forward to hearing Lukáš Vondráček and Alban Gerhardt play concerts with us, and hearing some new soloists with WASO like Clara-Jumi Kang and Yeol Eum Son.

Jenna Smith, Acting Principal Trumpet

I’m looking forward to the incredible opportunity to perform Hummel’s Trumpet Concerto. It will be my first time performing as a soloist with WASO. I’m both excited and nervous. 

I love performing movie scores so I’m very excited for Star Wars: The Force Awakens and also Frozen in Concert. I’m a huge Star Wars and Disney nerd! 

But the concert I’m most looking forward to is Mahler’s Eighth Symphony with Asher Fisch. Mahler is my favourite composer and this will certainly be an epic concert.

Alex Millier, Principal Bass Clarinet

I’ll start with a quote: "A painter paints pictures on canvas. But musicians paint their pictures on silence" - Leopold Stokowski.

No music does this quite like Richard Wagner’s operas, or ‘musical dramas’ from the late 1800s. In June, we explore excerpts from Wagner’s epic magnum opus, “The Ring of the Nibelung” in Ring Cycle. First performed in 1876 at a purpose-built theatre, the musical “leitmotifs” for key figures, emotions, places, curses, treaties, objects, good, evil and most importantly love, ingeniously weave a story of drama.

100 years later, Star Wars drew from the well of Wagner’s musical inspiration. We perform John Williams’ music live for Star Wars: the Force Awakens in Concert in April. Equally brilliant musical threads are woven through Thomas Newman’s dynamic score for the James Bond film Spectre in Concert, and The Music of Hans Zimmer in May explores iconic music from celluloid classics including The Lion King, Gladiator and Inception.

Mozart’s Requiem in October features in the movie Amadeus and Rachmaninov’s Third Piano Concerto is an integral part of the story in Shine.

Where would movies be without music? The action, drama and emotions of the flickering images are heightened as the lights dim and we’re transported to other worlds. 2024 includes so many fantastic examples of this and is, quite simply, a feast for the senses.

Explore WASO’s 2024 Season. Tickets on sale now!