Review: WASO’s Composition Project at State Theatre Centre of WA

WASO’s Composition Project 2025 at State Theatre Centre of WA
Tuesday, June 24, 2025

The last piece in the jigsaw of WA Symphony’s year on the move was set in place Tuesday night when the Studio Underground at the State Theatre Centre joined the round of venues.

The Composition Project is another facet of the jewel that is our State orchestra. Under the direction of composer/conductor James Ledger, the WASO Education Chamber Orchestra premiered short works by four emerging West Australian composers: Darcy Lewis, Lucas Tomkins, Somayeh Heidarvand and Domenic Lamattina.

The program marked a turn for WASO into the realms of contemporary cutting-edge music. As Ledger pointed out in his introduction, although all of the compositions in the program are new, they are not, in the strict classical sense, ‘New Music.’ That was the name given to a movement that sprung up after World War II. Heavily intellectual and mathematically based, it was marked by its complexity over listenability. Never that popular with a general audience, some have described it as post-enjoyable.

In their complexity and sometimes esoteric abstractions, the compositions in this program did fit loosely into the earlier style, but the end result was anything but unlistenable. Instead, these works were entertaining and original, some highly visual, others atmospheric, one playful and funny, and all of them thoroughly engaging.

The WASO education chamber ensemble is a microcosm of the main orchestra. With the exception of keyboards, the fourteen musicians cover the range of orchestral instruments, but instead of a bank, there is only one player for each. In the case of the woodwinds, the musicians double up: flute/piccolo, oboe/cor anglais, clarinet/bass clarinet, and bassoon/contrabassoon. Built around a classic string quartet—first and second violin, viola and cello—as well as the woodwinds, there is a double bass, horn, trumpet, trombone, tuba and percussion.

The concert opened with Darcy Lewis’ Aluminated Grey.

A member of WAAPA’s HearNow Art Orchestra, Lewis melds Western Art Music with improvisation and meta-musical processes. While exploring new mediums and techniques, he incorporates historical methods and instruments and maintains a personal performance style focused on improvisation and ‘the use of instruments as an extension of the performer.’

Of Aluminated Grey, he says, “The piece utilises several non-standard techniques and plays with different methods of graphic notation to place the musicians, and the sound they produce, into the darkness they are imitating.”

The word ‘Aluminated’ refers to “the subtle influence of the aluminium foil affixed to the bell of the bass clarinet. Some frequencies resonate the foil and gently ‘Aluminate’ the swirling sound around it.”

The result was a piece that grew from a soft shimmering of cymbals into a dark, esoteric roiling of the full ensemble. As well as the aluminium, the trumpet, trombone and tuba varied between their muted and open configurations. Abstract and powerful, the piece was like a walk through an eerie terrain in which something dangerous seems about to happen but never quite does.

The second piece was Lucas Tomkins’ Infinities.

Tomkins’ interest in composition was fired at an early age through improvising on the piano and watching WASO. Now in his second year at UWA, he finds his musical inspiration in the ‘quiet, reflective stillness’ of the Australian landscape.

He regards Infinities as “a collage of musically related phrases, motifs, and harmonic or textural gestures.” The opening melodic phrase was conceived on a trip to Fitzgerald River National Park, while the title, Infinities refers to the “feeling of expansiveness, or beauty, or solitude, [you feel in] vast, rugged, wild natural landscapes.”

Strongly visual, at times comic, the piece was effective in its evocation of the Australian bush—its wildness and random interjection of odd sounds from birds and beasts, the stillness as well as the movement of wind through the scrub.

Tomkins was right to call it a collage: the different phrases sat sharply against each other, each in their own way evocative and beautiful in their transitions from one to the other. A bowed string passage morphed into a horn-led brass crescendo, then back into a plaintive cello-led string phrase to end across the full ensemble in a lush and gentle chord.

The third composer was Somayeh Heidarvand.

Heidarvand’s multicultural background gives her compositions a broad musical perspective. Her evolving style has been heavily influenced by her interest in nature as the primary source of human auditory perception. The inspiration for Resonances of Matilda Bay came while studying for her master’s degree in composition at UWA’s Crawley campus.

“The sounds of the river, wind, insects, and swans are present throughout and constitute the structure. … It aims to awaken and activate the listener’s imagination to portray those scenes by submerging them in a world of sonic effects and colourful timbres that evolve and transform constantly.”

Working directly with the playing techniques from the New Music movement, her aim was to make them more practical. She succeeded in spades. It was as though you were lying on your back with your eyes closed, listening to the river around you. The oboe mimicked perfectly the cry of the swan, the loud opening valves of the contrabassoon and bass clarinet imitated the lapping waves, the brass section blowing through their instruments without making a note captured the sound of the wind, while the buzzing strings evoked the insects and midges out to bite you. It was quite magical.

The final piece in the program was Domenic Lamattina’s I Jest, You Jest.

At high school, Lamattina studied percussion and composition. Now a student at the WA Academy of Performing Arts, he has won the prestigious Royal Over-Seas League Orchestral Composition Prize while WAAPA’s concert band and percussion ensemble have premiered his student work.

He regards I Jest, You Jest as possibly his “wackiest work to date. It depicts a court jester who discovers he has magical powers and decides to use them to wreak havoc.”

And wreak havoc he does. As Lamattina says, it is “a wild ride.”

In introducing the piece, Ledger noted that the overall effect echoes the chaotic scores of the once ubiquitous Looney Tunes TV cartoons. ‘The most complex and sophisticated music score for the most ludicrous stories.’

In some ways I Jest, You Jest was the most conventional piece in the entire set. It utilised traditional instrumentation—classic brass crescendos and soaring woodwind melodies—but broke them up with quick jumps of tempo and effect—drum rolls and other flourishes of percussion. Like the manic Looney Tunes characters with their ever disruptive and diverging plotlines, the audience was buffeted from one idea to the next with barely a chance to catch their breath. And that was before the jester started to run wild. In the second half, random, misplaced elements disrupted the work even more. The musicians fell in and out of sync, swapped rhythms and keys, and constantly countered each other.

This playful piece is a whole lot of fun, stunning in Lamattina’s confidence with orchestration and his whacky sense of humour.

All up, the breadth of musical talent on display in the concert was impressive. It indicates that there is a vibrant and imaginative scene at play in Perth, one that promises to release much great music in the years to come.

Artistic Director/Conductor James Ledger’s day job is Chair of Composition at UWA’s Conservatorium of Music. A renowned composer in his own right, his music has been performed around the world. He has received commissions from Australia’s leading ensembles, including the Australian Chamber Orchestra and the Australian String Quartet, and twice collaborated with singer/songwriter Paul Kelly on ARIA-winning albums. Earlier this year his specially commissioned The Light Fantastic, a celebration of Winthrop Hall, opened WASO’s 2025 mainhouse program in that venue.

As Tuesday’s concert attests, the Composition Project is an effective development program that enables young artists to trial their ideas on experienced professionals and take their work to the next level of complexity and presentation. Running since 2009 under Ledger’s leadership, it has launched some seventy new works. The young composers are mentored by both Ledger and the WASO Composer-in-Residence, while the workshops and rehearsals allow them to work closely with the individual members of the chamber orchestra.

On the strength of their compositions, one composer from each year’s cohort is selected to create a three- to five-minute piece for WASO’s mainstage education concert the following year. At the end of Tuesday’s performance, it was announced that this year’s selected artist is Darcy Lewis. It will be a delight to hear the work he creates for the full orchestra.

WASO will be back in the Studio Underground at the end of this week for its Underground Series Danceworks, musical mavericks, while this Saturday they are performing Side by Side Symphony in Winthrop Hall.

IAN LILBURNE

Photos by West Australian Symphony Orchestra