Tony Thomas
I have been a season subscriber to the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra (MSO) on and off for about forty years, not that I am any sort of musical sophisticate. In about 1959, at the age of nineteen, I was bitten by the classical music bug. Through those twelve-inch long-playing records, I began working my way through all the canonical composers on the family radiogram. In that impecunious era, I could not afford to buy the records at full price; fortunately, the World Record Club offered members a free LP for each person introduced as a subscriber, and so I temporarily signed up every variety of my name (Tony, Anthony, “A.P.” …) to claim the bonus records.
Second-hand record shops sometimes stocked operas in hefty box sets, and through good fortune, with my newspaper cadet’s earnings, my first purchases were Mario del Monaco’s tuneful rendition of Il Trovatoreand that famous Lucia di Lammermoor with Joan Sutherland—rather than, for instance, Richard Strauss’s Elektra. Not long after 1960, stereo earphones arrived in Perth, creating a hemisphere of delight in one’s head. I was a long-term hospital patient at the time, and with some help from a tradie I soldered up a stereo amplifier to harness the operatic magic. One morning, whilst entranced by Victoria de los Angeles, the transformer caught fire and our whole ward had to be evacuated.
In short, I am one of those average types who probably make up the bulk of the MSO’s subscribers. And we do matter, because ticket sales make up a quarter of the MSO’s $40 million in annual revenue.
To arrive at the point, my arduous trips from Keilor to Hamer Hall for evenings of Mozart, Mahler and Dvořák, to name only a few, these days involve an irritation. This is because the MSO now sees its mission as not purely one of music but to douse the audience in progressive urgings. I think, on balance, most concertgoers are content to appease this intent. The evermore elaborate and insincere “Acknowledgements of Country” are followed by ripples of applause and no audible restlessness from any malcontents. I have heard similar accounts from friends who frequent the Sydney Opera House.
The apotheosis of Melbourne progressivism came last September when those executives and musicians, speaking on behalf of the whole orchestra and administration, threw their support behind the Voice to Parliament. They announced a desire “to walk with First Nations people to create a better future”. They viewed the impending referendum as “a unique opportunity for national reflection upon our past, and the creation of a new and respectful shared future through consultation and actions taken in the present”. Further, they pledged to pump up their Aboriginality, through more Aboriginal performers and more Aboriginal music, ensuring these Australians are “better heard within our own Orchestra”. They persisted, “This continues a tradition of storytelling through music which is an important part of a continuum on the country of the world’s longest surviving Indigenous cultures.” I am really not sure what that sentence actually means.
In March 2023, the MSO introduced what it called Mob Tix for anyone identifying as Aboriginal—or even Maori, Pasifika or “First Nations people from other countries”. Under the MSO’s rules, these people are all entitled, with no questions asked, to “a discounted rate to certain concerts”. Well, it certainly is good to encourage along any Kalahari Bushmen, Eskimos, Ainus, Kikuyus, Bedouin and Sioux into otherwise, of course, empty seats, providing that, say, Huli Wigmen do not block one’s view of the stage. The MSO’s 2022 annual report provides no less than eight mentions of the company’s programs for National Aborigines and Islanders Day Observance Committee (NAIDOC) Week. The report quoted a press review about how one of the orchestra’s three offerings for NAIDOC “unashamedly” showcased the “injustices and mistreatment that still confront our First Nations People”.
As for all capital symphony orchestras, their “DEI”—that is, their diversity, equity and inclusion —credentials are being tracked by a Perth-based group called Tenth Muse Initiative, named after the Greek poet Sappho. Led by soprano and creative producer Hannah Lee Tungate and her Women Composers Project, it checks how many works of female, First Nations, living and/or historical composers of colour are performed annually. She told Limelight magazine (March 8, 2024) that she wants “to hold our major orchestras to account”, especially because of their over-scheduling of “the same dead German men every year”. Well, roll over Pachelbel, Telemann, Bach, Handel, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Wagner, Brahms, Strauss, Reger and Hindemith. Even Stockhausen can get stuffed, as now can Aribert Reimann, who passed away in March this year.
Tungate was aggrieved to learn that 90.2 per cent of works programmed by Australia’s major orchestras last year were by men, which she said was even worse than in 2022 (only 85.5 per cent men in that year). The programming of the Western Australia Symphony Orchestra (WASO) comprised 82.3 per cent dead males (labelled as “historical composers”), 11.3 per cent living males and 6.5 per cent living women. WASO failed to include any works by non-binary or gender-diverse composers, nor anything from composers of colour. The Sydney Symphony Orchestra was, by these same metrics, just as bad: 86.6 per cent dead men’s works, 8.9 per cent living men’s and 4.5 per cent living women’s. “There were more works by Beethoven, Mozart, Debussy, Schubert, Rachmaninov and Tchaikovsky each than by [all the] women combined,” Tungate added of the SSO. But it really is quite hard to say whether audiences are actually crying out for music by women, Aborigines, the gender-diverse and composers of colour, or whether they simply expect (and pay) to hear well-crafted orchestral music. I know I certainly do. I think all this reflects John O’Sullivan’s First Law: “All organisations that are not actually right-wing will over time become left-wing.”
I HAVE an anecdote, or series of them, about the MSO from nearly fifteen years ago, before its predictable takeover by a progressive caste. From the top down, the MSO was in those days an institution quite willing to smack off any deviations from professionalism. It was even willing to concede the merits of arguments by a cantankerous conservative: me. I am certain the MSO would give short shrift to such complaints today, however cogent or meritorious.
On June 20, 2009, I turned up at the Melbourne Concert Hall to enjoy Prokofiev’s Fifth Symphony, and nearly blew a fuse. The MSO’s free program note was written as if by some Soviet shill. It quoted Prokofiev praising the cultural freedom of Soviet artists. Strangely for a 2009 performance, these notes were dated 1997, six years after the Soviet Union’s collapse. Without any editorial commentary from the MSO, Prokofiev in this note swiped at the lack of “freedom of the human spirit” in the United States, in contrast to “free and happy Soviet man”. Dmitri Kabalevsky, a Soviet composer, cultural enforcer, and three-time winner of the Stalin Prize, was also quoted, reporting how Prokofiev helped in the running of a war-time composers’ commune, where Prokofiev “encouraged the others to discuss their daily achievements in an atmosphere of mutual trust”.
Arriving home, I hurriedly penned a letter to the MSO. I pointed out that, prior to the premiere of the Fifth, Prokofiev had already suffered as, to ensure his good behaviour, his wife Lena and two sons were held as hostages in Siberia. For all anyone knows, the quotes attributed to him could have been drafted by the NKVD, and Prokofiev, in signing off on them, was very likely held at some implied, or even real, gunpoint. “I can hardly believe that these MSO programme notes could be so ill-informed and so keen to whitewash an era of hideous tyranny and murder in the now-unlamented Soviet Union,” I wrote to the orchestra. To defeat the normal bureaucratic reaction, I posted a copy of the letter not only to the MSO’s managing director, Trevor Green, but also its chief conductor, Oleg Caetani, himself the son of Russian conductor Igor Markevitch and doubtless well apprised of actual Soviet musical history. I am sure he had not read the published notes.
You might reasonably suppose my letter was hastily tossed into the nearest bin? Not so. One month later, Green responded to me, writing, among other things, “I agree with you that Prokofiev needs to be discussed more even-handedly. Accordingly, we will commission a new note for our next performance of this work, and will, when the budget allows, commission new annotations for other Soviet-era works that may be performed in future seasons.” Bravo, Trevor Green! However—and why must there always be a however—on May 22 the following year, I again attended the Concert Hall, and this time found myself reading the program notes to Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet. When home, I penned another letter to the MSO. The notes, I wrote, were all right, but:
I was outraged by the illustration of Stalin … This [the included image] is a propagandistic illustration from the height of the Stalin cult period. Yet the caption merely states that it is Joseph Stalin. It is not Joseph Stalin, who was short, with a low forehead, and a swarthy pockmarked face. The illustration shows Stalin as handsome, wise and statesmanlike, a heroic war leader, avuncular, tall, stern but with a hint of kindness. Using such a picture without describing it as a propaganda picture is an insult to all the many millions whom that man murdered, including at least a few hundred artists, writers and, doubtless, composers, along with their colleagues, family and friends … I am sure that whoever selected the heroic Stalin illustration did so merely from lack of sophistication and lack of historical perspective. But I am surprised that someone of more maturity in a cosmopolitan city like Melbourne did not tell him or her that Stalin was a mass murderer and not a hero.
(Incidentally, one of my critics made the reasonable point that non-propaganda portraits of Stalin are almost non-existent, except maybe from group portraits at Yalta and Potsdam.) This letter was mailed to Matthew VanBesien, who had replaced Green as the orchestra’s managing director, and guest conductor Andrew Litton. After leaving the MSO, VanBesien went on to become President of the New York Philharmonic.
A month later, VanBesien replied, acknowledging that the choice of photograph could have been more discerning. “For which, of course, I apologise to you,” he wrote, before adding, “but I am not convinced that the photograph automatically denies Stalin’s atrocities”. VanBesien cited other music programs that had featured Jacques-Louis David’s propagandistic depictions of Napoleon, as well as official photographs of Tsar Nicholas II. “These men were responsible for thousands—if not millions—of deaths,” wrote VanBesien. “None of this was wiped away for me by seeing Napoleon on a horse or Nicholas II looking statesmanlike. I will of course bring this issue to the attention of the staff responsible for production of printed programs.”
So far, so good. A year passed. On December 10, 2011, I was back to the Melbourne Town Hall, this time reading the program notes to Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony. The text? It was all fine. The illustration? Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin. His outfit: a bemedalled uniform, circa 1945. His forehead: high. His expression: noble, but caring. His complexion: to die for! And the illustration’s caption? “Propagandaportrait of Stalin”. Huzzah!
We humble members of the public should always be assertive towards the powers-that-be when they get things wrong, for whatever reason. In that historical MSO case, the orchestra’s management was responsive and positive towards an admittedly cranky music lover, who takes anything to do with Stalin very seriously (I’ve re-read all volumes of the Gulag Archipelago several times). But sadly, the zeitgeist is now ever so different, and not for the better.
Tony Thomas is a Melbourne-based journalist whose essays are published by Quadrant and Connor Court
No B-S here (I hope) 