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
The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night on Burton's "Nights" criticised his eccentric "mixture of obsolete words, mediaeval phrases, modern slang, Americanisms, and foreign words and expressions". Jorge Luis Borges, however, wrote a celebrated essay on “The Translators of "The Thousand and One Nights"” in which – while he chastises Burton for his distortions and "indulgent loitering" — he allows that “the problems that Burton resolved are innumerable” and delights in his careful use of an extravagantly exotic vocabulary in which each word "is indubitably the ""." In summarising his use of language, Borges concluded that “In some way, the almost inexhaustible process of English is adumbrated