★★★★★ Young and Bell create a brilliant synthesis between music and narrative.

Sydney Opera House, Concert Hall
August 20, 2015

It is often with a sense of doom and gloom that new repertoire is greeted when first introduced to the music world. Violin concerti from Paganini to Tchaikovsky were pronounced unplayable: indeed, in the latter’s case, the preeminent violinist of the day had to suffer the ignominy of turning down the premiere despite being the dedicatee due to the concerto’s technical demands. Prokofiev’s music for the ballet Romeo and Juliet had an equally unpropitious birth, with six years passing between the conception of the ballet in 1934 and its Soviet premiere owing to its technical difficulty and quirky arrangement. Under the stewardship of Simone Young the Sydney Symphony demonstrated no such technical difficulty, commandingly navigating the demands of this work. Indeed, the concert exhibited two titans of the Australian arts landscape, with Young conducting a series of selections from the ballet interspersed with extracts from the play performed by members of the Bell Shakespeare chosen by that other Australian artistic treasure, John Bell. Interestingly, Bell threaded the music and textual fragments according to themes rather than chronology. The result...