It may have been the curiosity value of the program, or maybe it was the nearly 50 years that have passed since the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra last made landfall in New York. Either way this Carnegie Hall concert at the tail end of the MSO’s North American tour appeared pretty much sold out. In the event, a subset of less than half the orchestra – I counted around 35 players – with concertmaster Dale Barltrop directing impressively from the violin, easily held the attention of an audience, which included Malcolm and Lucy Turnbull as well as former Arts Minister, now Ambassador to the USA, Mitch Fifield.

A pair of contemporary Australian works were the meat in the sandwich of an oddly unbalanced evening – the second half was over in less than 30 mins. The concert was bookended with a pair of early Romantic works: Rossini’s fizzing overture to L’Italiana in Algeri (The Italian Girl in Algiers) and Schubert’s charming, but rarely played (at least, rarely played live) Third Symphony. The Rossini received a spirited account despite some early pianissimos being disrupted by a pair of clumping latecomers. Barltrop took it...