Half an hour with the West Australian Symphony Orchestra’s delightful Executive Manager of Artistic Planning, Marshall McGuire, simply disappears into the whirl of his infectious enthusiasm for WASO, and its upcoming eightieth birthday celebrations in 2008. Zoe Carter toyed with the idea of getting a word in edgewise, but, well, as you can see…
‘It’s all exciting! It’s an 80th anniversary season, which is always good for focusing the mind and thinking about where we’ve been, but also more importantly, where to for the next 80 years. Gosh, the last couple of weeks has felt like 80 years, but that’s okay. It’s part of that rich heritage, and at the [2008] season launch, I talked about this great continuum of music that we’re part of, you know 400 years old, and the evolution that needs to happen all the time to move it to the next step. So, while we present Beethoven and Brahms and all the great works of the classical repertoire, there are all sorts of other things that we do on top of that – big occasions, big events, that we put on.
‘Not only for our audiences, but also for the musicians who are here there needs to be a constant kaleidoscope of activity to keep them engaged and excited and creative and all of those things. So overall, there’s the sort of theme of relationships in the orchestra between players, and I think it’s also important to focus on the relationship we have with our audience too. That’s a very close bond, people don’t just come out and throw money away on us. They actually consider what they do and they consider what they buy and they consider it on the basis of mostly repertoire I find. Sometimes it’s based on guest artists, if they’re well known or if they’ve got a quirky little piece of interest there. Also the thing I find with WASO at the end of my first year is the incredibly close relationships people feel with the players of the orchestra. It’s like a big happy family, which is kind of nice; it doesn’t happen in a lot of other orchestras. So, with that in mind, I was looking at works that WASO plays really well. The repertoire that we do well and works for the audience – that they will either know or put familiar works in context with unfamiliar works so that we have a bit of a journey through each program and then by extension throughout the year as well. So, you can go through Masters and feel like you’ve started somewhere, but also quite tangibly feel that you’ve been on a really interesting musical journey.
‘Classics…what we’ve tried to do here is put one work in each programme that everyone should know, you know Rachmaninov’s Second Piano Concerto, Fauré’s Requiem, Beethoven’s Fifth, those sort of things and build fantastic programmes around them, and I’m hoping that will excite people. We’ve got some seriously great artists in here actually; it’s going to be a very good series – I’d go to it – which is a good sign!
‘I know classical music sometimes has a mystery about it, there’s an etiquette and there are rituals about going to concerts just like there are rituals about going to church or going to footy or going anywhere you haven’t been before. One thing WASO does incredibly well is welcome everybody and explain how it goes with pre-concert talks and free programmes – we’re putting our programme notes online next year so you can download them before you come to concerts and make the whole thing experience open.
‘I always say to people it’s just music – all you have to do is sit there and listen to it and get something out of it. If it’s something you know great, if you’ve learnt something new from a new piece even better. With the programme next year, if you like Wagner or Neil Sedaka or Happy Birthday, or you know Ben Lee’s ‘cos that’s the way I like it’… there’s something for everyone.’
