Review: WASO’s Danceworks at State Theatre Centre of WA
WASO’s Danceworks at State Theatre Centre of WA
Saturday, June 26, 2025
It is fitting that the first concert in WA Symphony’s 2025 Underground Series should be subtitled Musical Mavericks—even more fitting that such subversive music should be performed in the intimate, subterranean Studio Underground at the State Theatre Centre.
As WASO’s Director of Programming and Engagement, Evan Kennea, put it:
“The shift away from the Perth Concert Hall has given the orchestra the opportunity to branch out into different musical areas.”
Danceworks was surely a case in point—the program was about as far as you can get from WASO’s typical main house presentation.
Under the guest direction of Dutch conductor Otto Tausk, the show was effectively a survey of contemporary European minimalism as exemplified by the Hague School and its leader, Louis Andreissen. Infused with jazz and rock as well as European art music and including electric instruments—guitar, synthesiser, violin and bass—alongside the traditional strings, brass, woodwinds, a full percussion suite, piano and a harp, it was more what you would expect from the Australian Chamber Orchestra than WASO. Avant-garde, boundary-breaking, relentlessly modern.
There were four works in the program: Michael Torke’s Adjustable Wrench (1987), Louis Andriessen’s Dances (1991), Martin Padding’s Slow March to Moscow (2006), and Steve Martland’s Dance Works (1993).
As Tausk described it:
The Hague School moved “away from serialism and abstraction and back to a more physical and socially engaged kind of music. Powerful rhythmic repetition, often confrontational and meaningful, dissonant chords, but always emotionally charged and accessible to the listener. Infused with irony and humour… There is a lot of rhythmic, motoric patterns going on, but Andriessen somehow always managed to pair that with an enormous emotional power … [It] could overall be described as minimalism—but always with a twist.”
This captures the essence of the music in this concert, especially the last three pieces—both the Dutch Padding and English Martland studied under Andriessen at the Royal Conservatory of Music in The Hague.
Michael Torke, though, is an American (born in Milwaukee in 1961). Although heavily influenced by the Europeans and, like them, enthralled by jazz and tangential to the American minimalist school of Steve Reich and Jon Adams, his is still a distinctly American oeuvre. The overall feel of Adjustable Wrench is of skipping down Madison Avenue on a sunny spring day sometime in the 1950s (that is, before Andy Warhol’s expressionistic darkness flooded our perception of New York).
Although, like all minimalism, the work is built on a driving syncopated pulse broken across the ensemble, it echoes the bright optimism you first hear in Dvorak’s New World Symphony and later in the works of Gershwin and Copeland. The interweaving of marimba, clarinet, pulsing piano, and pizzicato strings into a syncopated ostinato is exquisite. Driving and joyous, ruthlessly upbeat.
This short work was followed by Andriessen’s longer and darker Dances.
The twist in this piece came through an operatic overlay. After a lush first movement in which the expanded ensemble laid a gradually changing, ever-darkening minimalist bed, soprano Sara Macliver delivered a series of angular arias. Although you could read the lyrics in the projected surtitles, simply listening to the texture of her voice created an exquisite tension within the music, the modulated pulse fractured by her all too human emotion. It was haunting and tense, multi-layered and rich, at times shattering.
Each work in the program employed a different orchestration. In the gaps between, subterranean, black-clad figures scampered the stage, resetting the seats, music stands and microphones—the concert was recorded for ABC broadcast.
After the interval there was another short work, as Tausk described it in his introduction, the most abstract in the program.
Padding’s Slow March to Moscow is an ironic take on Napoleon’s invasion of Russia. It follows a group of Dutch soldiers not at all enamoured of the French emperor’s imperialist ambitions.
The repeated phase on which this music is built is a plodding piano march, punctuated by the unusual effect of a fingernail run quickly down a piece of A3 paper, a kind of percussive sneeze. Fractured notes across the ensemble—air blown through a horn, moans from the string section—depict the bored Dutchmen soldiering through this minor farce.
The concert came to its climax in the final piece, Steve Martland’s Dance Works.
Of all the night’s ensembles, this was the most outrageous: three saxophones, electric violin, electric guitar, piano, electric bass, trombone and trumpet/cornet. Notably, of the nine players, six were guest musicians, including prominent jazz players Karl Florrison and Matt Styles.
An extraordinary and exhilarating work, minimalism crossing into funk, the syncopated pulse was driven by the piano with blasts on the saxophones, chops on the electric guitar and fragmented bass runs. Overlain with intricate electric violin figures, slowly expanding notes on the trombone and short melodic lines on the trumpet or cornet, you had a rhythmically wild, danceable configuration that saw the whole room rocking.
Martland’s music is often described as muscular and powerfully rhythmic. This was certainly true of this piece; at the end, the audience were buzzing with excitement and energy.
‘The uncompromising godfather of European minimalism,’ Louis Andriessen is regarded as a maverick and provocateur. Danceworks proved this to be undoubtedly true. A musical pioneer who left his mark on a generation of composers.
A worthy addition to WASO’s annual program, here’s hoping the Underground Series presents more such exciting concerts of this calibre.
The recording of Danceworks is scheduled for broadcast on ABC Classic FM at 1pm on Thursday, July 31.
IAN LILBURNE
Photos by Daniel Grant
