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
A Pastoral Symphony of peace. Like many of the composer's works, the "Pastoral Symphony" is not programmatic, but its spirit is very evocative. None of the movements are particularly fast or upbeat (the composer himself described it as "four movements, all of them slow"), but there are isolated extroverted sections. It was first performed in London on 16 January 1922, with Adrian Boult conducting. The symphony was dismissed by Constant Lambert, who wrote that its "creation of a particular type of grey, reflective, English-landscape mood has outweighed the exigencies of symphonic form". Peter Warlock's often-quoted comment that "it is all just a little