The.SYO – Turangalîla.
The.SYO – Turangalîla.
We’re thrilled by the overwhelming response to the Turangalîla-Symphonie concert! The initial allocation of tickets has now been exhausted. Any cancelled tickets will be added directly to Humanitix for reallocation. Please note there will be no tickets available at the door on the day of performance.
Tickets
- Sunday 15 December 2024
- 2pm
- White Bay Power Station, Rozelle
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Tickets free with registration
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Getting to White Bay Power Station – No parking available
“Turanga: this is the time that runs, like a galloping horse; this is time that flows, like sand in an hourglass. Turanga is movement and rhythm. Turangalîla therefore means all at once love song, hymn to joy, time, movement, rhythm, life and death.”
-Olivier Messiaen
Concert
Program
Conductor
The.SYO
Philharmonic
Concert
Join The.SYO and Stanley Dodds for Olivier Messiaen’s “Turangalîla-Symphonie”. A megalithic 10 movement expression of joy and one of the seminal works of the 20th century.
With its large array of exotic instruments, including the Ondes Martenot and a highly virtuoso solo piano part it is a work seldomly performed, and this is your chance to catch it live.
In his own words “Turanga”: this is the time that runs, like a galloping horse; this is time that flows, like sand in an hourglass. “Turanga” is movement and rhythm. “Turangalîla” therefore means all at once love song, hymn to joy, time, movement, rhythm, life and death.”
Messiaen draws upon his own highly structured compositional techniques and his fascination with bird song, Hindi rhythms and Balinese gamelan sounds to create his very personal and inimitable sonic universe.
It is a piece that must be experienced live. The opportunity to perform this work will be a once-in-a-lifetime event for The.SYO and Stanley Dodds is thrilled to take them on this journey.
Program
Graeme KOEHNE – Powerhouse
George GERSHWIN – Rhapsody in Blue. Piano soloist Kelly Liu
Artists
The Philharmonic Orchestra – Powered by SYO
Olivier MESSIAEN
Turangalîla-symphonie 1946-1948; rev 1990 74′
Artists
Stanley Dodds conductor
The Sydney Youth Orchestra
Conductor
Stanley Dodds
We welcome Stanley Dodds as The.SYO’s Chief Conductor for 2024.
Stanley is the Principal Conductor of the Berlin Symphony Orchestra, resident in the Philharmonie Berlin. Annual season highlights include the New Year’s Day concert with Beethoven’s ninth symphony, an opera gala, themed symphony concerts and showcase concerts featuring instrumental concertos. This popular series is now in its seventh decade and plays consistently to a full house in the Philharmonie.
His passion for contemporary music led him to found the ZeMu! Ensemble in 2021, which gave its inaugural performances at the Singapore International Arts Festival the following year premiering the multimedia work “The Once and Future”, with further performances at the New Vision Arts Festival in Hong Kong in 2023. His recordings of works by Wolfgang Rihm with musicians of the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra were nominated in the category “Conductor of the Year” in Germany’s 2022 Opus Classic Awards. Further important performances and recordings include Martón Illés Violin Concerto with Patricia Kopatschinskaya and the Karajan-Academy Orchestra, a “Baltic Roots” project with Baiba Skride, the world premiere of “Alavò” by Vito Žuraj and works by Esa-Pekka Salonen with members of the Berlin Philharmoniker.
He has conducted opera productions of Mozart “Cosi fan tutte”, Bizet “Carmen”, Viardot “Cendrillon”, Weill “Mahagonny Songspiel” and Hindemith “Lehrstück”, Offenbach “The Princess of Trapezunt”, Haydn “Il mondo della luna”, Mozart/Tarkmann “Die Zauberflöte” and Albrecht “Ritter Parceval”.
When the Berliner Philharmoniker cancelled live performances during the shutdown from March until July 2020 Stanley Dodds created and produced “The Berlin Phil Series”, an eleven episode series of weekly online concerts for the Digital Concert Hall, where members of the Berliner Philharmoniker played and presented thematically conceived programs, complemented with selections from the Digital Concert Hall archive.
A highlight of the 2016 season was the invitation to conduct a concert with the Australian World Orchestra in the Sydney Opera House. Inaugurated in 2011 the orchestra annually brings together Australia’s successful classical musicians from around the world, including members of the Berlin Philharmonic and Vienna Philharmonic, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and London Symphony Orchestra, amongst many others. Previous conductors have been Simone Young, Alexander Briger, Zubin Mehta and Sir Simon Rattle.
Past guest conductor appearances include the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, Staatskapelle Halle, Hamburger Symphoniker, Sendai Philharmonic, Neubrandenburger Philharmonie, Istanbul State Symphony Orchestra, Beijing Symphony Orchestra, Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra, Canberra Symphony Orchestra, the Orchestre Philharmonique Luxembourg, Jena Philharmonic, Orchestra I Pomeriggi Musicale Milano, ensembles of the Berliner Philharmoniker, the Karajan-Academy Orchestra and the Scharoun Ensemble Berlin. He appears at major Festivals in Salzburg and Baden-Baden, at the Musikfest and MaerzMusik in Berlin, Musica Viva in Munich and the Summer Festival in Mecklenburg Western Pomerania.
Stanley Chia-Ming Dodds was born in Canada, grew up in Australia and as a dual German-Australian citizen is now based in Berlin. He began playing violin and piano in Adelaide at age four, attended the Bruckner Conservatorium and Musik High School in Linz before studying at Lucerne Conservatorium. He continued violin studies at the Karajan Academy of the Berlin Philharmonic before receiving tenure as a violinist in the orchestra in 1994.
He studied conducting in Australia, Switzerland and Germany, his most important mentor being the acclaimed Finnish professor Jorma Panula. Other important influences on his conducting career have been the chief conductors of the Berlin Philharmonic, Claudio Abbado, Sir Simon Rattle and Kirill Petrenko.
Stanley Dodds is dedicated to youth music and orchestral pedagogy. From 2024 he takes on the role of Chief Conductor of The Sydney Youth Orchestra (The.SYO). He is artistic director of the State Youth Orchestra of Mecklenburg Western Pomerania and the Youth Orchestra Festival in Neubrandenburg. For the Berliner Philharmoniker he led for many years the Schools Orchestra Concert and Youth Composition Workshop. On the occasion of the Berliner Philharmoniker’s annual 2017 European concert in Pafos he initiated a bi-communal orchestra project, conducting young musicians from the entire island of Cyprus together with members of the Berliner Philharmoniker, in a gesture of the universal language of music.
The.SYO
The Sydney Youth Orchestra (The.SYO) is the flagship orchestra within the orchestral training pathway at Sydney Youth Orchestras (SYO). SYO provides an environment for young musicians to connect, create and champion orchestral music, with many SYO alumni featuring within all the professional orchestras across Australia and around the world.
In 2024, The.SYO will be led by new Chief Conductor Stanley Dodds. With a deep passion for music and dedication to developing young talent, Dodds is committed to SYO’s mission to inspire, cultivate and champion the next generation of musicians.
The.SYO is powered by SYO. Established in 1973, SYO is celebrating over 50 years of connecting talented young musicians.
For more information on The.SYO visit:
Philharmonic
The SYO Philharmonic (SYOP) is the organisation’s second most senior ensemble which is comprised of 70 young musicians. Comprising of strings, (plus harp), full woodwind, brass, and percussion, this full-scale symphonic orchestra is an opportunity for musicians to hone their orchestral technique and ensemble skills with masterpieces of the orchestral canon.
The SYO Philharmonic explore a challenging and diverse body of works, ranging from the Late-Romantic masters such as Wagner, Brahms and Tchaikovsky, to twentieth-century composers including Shostakovich, Holst and Prokofiev.
Jacob Abela
Kelly Liu
Scott McDougall
Jacob Abela
Jacob Abela is a dynamic pianist, keyboardist, and ondist based in Naarm (Melbourne), known for his expertise across a wide range of musical styles. Whether navigating the complex demands of contemporary compositions, performing in the musical pit, or collaborating with theatre makers and opera companies, Jacob’s artistic approach is as diverse as it is innovative. Described as performing “like electricity…as if possessed by a musical demon” (Theatre People), Jacob’s artistry reflects a fearless pursuit of musical exploration and emotional depth.
Jacob has performed as the ondes soloist in Olivier Messiaen’s Turangalîla-Symphonie with the David Robertson and the Sydney Symphony Orchestra (2019), Simone Young and the Australian World Orchestra + ANAM Orchestra (2017), and Fabian Russell and the Melbourne Youth Orchestra (2011). He also played solo piano in the two-hour epic Des Canyons aux Étoiles with Fabian Russell and the ANAM Orchestra (2014).
As an ensemble musician, Jacob has worked as the keyboardist for contemporary ensemble Rubiks Collective since their inception in 2015 and has appeared as a guest performer with other leading ensembles including Speak Percussion and Ensemble Offspring. Recent collaborations include Get Cultured! (2023, 2024) with drag queen Olympia Bukkakis, The Crying Room: Exhumed (2024) by Marcus Ian McKenzie, and A Book of Hours (2023) with Kate Neal, Sal Cooper, and Rubiks Collective.
Jacob’s solo work interrogates new virtuosities, queer performance practice, active listening, and narrative-driven programming. His solo performance Études for real and imaginary keyboard (2022) features increasingly extreme examples of electronic manipulations applied to various keyboards, allowing the audience to reimagine the territories that keyboard instruments inhabit in our cultural memory. Territories of Oblivion (2023), by contrast, is a hallucinatory recital of solo piano works which lead the listener into progressively varied and vast sonic landscapes, activated in imagination by solely acoustic phenomena.
Kelly Liu
Kelly began studying piano at the age of five and moved to Australia in 2010, where she completed the Bachelor of Piano Performance at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music and Master of Teaching at University of New South Wales. She is currently undertaking Master of Piano Performance under Dr. Bernadette Harvey. Kelly has interpreted a wide range of repertoire from the Baroque to Contemporary and performs regularly as a soloist and chamber musician. She gave her first public recital at the age of 14 and performed the Mozart Piano Concerto No.17.
Since 2022, Kelly was invited as a guest musician to join the North Sydney Symphony Orchestra. In the same year, she was selected as the winner of the concerto competition at UNSW and her interview on the preparation for the concerto was published by both UNSW as well as ‘Cut-Common’ music magazine. In November 2022, Kelly led the UNSW Symphony Orchestra and performed Chopin Piano Concerto No.1 at the Sir John Clancy Auditorium. In 2024, Kelly performed with the Sydney Conservatorium of Music Orchestra conducted by Fabian Russell.
Kelly is also a high school music teacher and has taught in various high schools in Sydney, but her passion remains in piano and nature. She loves animals and nature since childhood and has had many experiences in animal rescue. Her biggest dream is to see more and more people care about animals and our beautiful planet Earth.
Scott McDougall
Scott McDougall is an accomplished pianist with extensive experience in orchestral, chamber, and solo performance. He recently completed his studies at the Australian National Academy of Music, following a Bachelor of Music (Performance) at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music under the tutelage of Bernadette Harvey, Gerard Willems, and Phillip Shovk. While at the Conservatorium, he was awarded the Dorothy Ryder Phillips Prize for piano performance.
Scott has performed as a casual musician with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra and collaborates with ensembles such as Ensemble Apex and the AYO Momentum Ensemble. His chamber music experience includes winning the Henderson Travellers Scholarship with his piano trio in 2019, enabling him to study with renowned musicians at the Kuhmo Chamber Music Festival (Finland) and participate in masterclasses at the Hannover Conservatorium and the Hanns Eisler School of Music Berlin.
An active participant in Australian Youth Orchestra programs since 2017, Scott has been involved in National Music Camps and a chamber music project curated by Piers Lane in collaboration with the Tinalley String Quartet.
Working with acclaimed Finnish pianist Paavali Jumppanen has been an enriching opportunity, further developing Scott’s artistic perspective and interpretative depth.
You can find Scott on Instagram at @mc.dougs.
Photo Credit: James Tarbotton
