Zelman Symphony capacity audiences of Mahler's epic Eighth Symphony - the "Symphony of a Thousand" - at the Melbourne Town Hall. In what was believed to be "a first" for an Australian Community Orchestra, the performances involved over 580 performers including an augmented Zelman Symphony of some 125 players led by Guest Concertmaster, Wilma Smith, Concertmaster of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra (MSO), and featuring many guest principal players from the MSO and other top orchestras and music institutions. David Macfarlane played the magnificent organ, a 370 voice choir was formed from nine community choirs, and an 80 voice children's choir involved students
Ellora Symphony Ellora Symphony Yasushi Akutagawa's Ellora Symphony was composed in 1958 after a visit to the Ellora Caves in Aurangabad, India. One of several Japanese primitivistic symphonies composed in the 1950s, including Akira Ifukube's Sinfonia Tapkaara and Kan Ishii's Sinfonia Ainu, it is representative of Akutagawa's most adventurous period, when he associated Toru Takemitsu and Toshiro Mayuzumi and embraced avant-garde music. Instead of the traditional multi-movement layout, which Akutagawa had used in his Shostakovichian Prima Sinfonia three years earlier, the Ellora Symphony is structured in fifteen sequences: eight caressing "feminine" fragments marked Adagio or Andante and seven aggressive "masculine" ones marked