The Adelaide Symphony Orchestra’s 2022 season is entitled Perpetual Emotion, and many of the concerts are given their own sub-theme. In the case of this concert, the sub-theme was Joy, suggesting the emotional orientation of the musical programming for the evening. The selected works, however, drew on a much broader emotional palette, and it was the enlivening humanism imbued in them that came through most strongly.

Jayson Gillham. Photo © Benjamin Ealovega

The concert opened with Korean composer Unsuk Chin’s subito con forza (Immediately with Force) from 2020, which quotes fragments of Beethoven works and places them in a highly novel setting — there is no traditional thematic statement and recapitulation, no form that would be familiar to Beethoven. Chin’s brief but dramatic work, written in the 250th anniversary year of Beethoven’s birth, commences with the first motive of the Coriolan Overture and then abruptly shifts to a barely audible passage for strings. There are frequent such dramatic shifts in instrumentation, texture, dynamics and tone. A passage for piano hints at Beethoven’s piano concerti, a tympani roll suggests a storm or war, and a clarinet passage...