Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra (TSO)

A Broadcasting Orchestra

The Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra was founded in 1948 as one of the state orchestras established by the Australian Broadcasting Commission in the years after the Second World War. The Commission's plan was to give every capital city a permanent, publicly funded orchestra whose concerts could be broadcast across the national network. Hobart, with fewer than a hundred thousand people, was the smallest city in the scheme, and many in Sydney and Melbourne doubted it could sustain an orchestra at all.

The first players numbered fewer than thirty. Most were part-time, and many held other jobs as teachers, clerks and church organists. They rehearsed in the Commission's cramped studios in Hobart and gave their concerts in the Town Hall and the Theatre Royal, where stagehands moved the music stands on and off between pantomimes and touring variety acts. Concerts were broadcast live, and for many listeners in remote parts of the island the radio was the only orchestra they would ever hear.

The orchestra's founding conductor was Karl Foerster, a Vienna-born musician who had fled Austria in 1938 and spent the war teaching in Melbourne. He was demanding, short-tempered and devoted to the Central European repertoire he had grown up with, and he drilled the young orchestra in Beethoven, Brahms and Dvořák until it could hold its own on the national broadcasts. His rehearsal diaries, later given to the State Library of Tasmania, record a long and bitter running dispute with the brass section over tempo. He also programmed new Australian work more often than his audiences liked, including pieces by the Hobart composers Arthur Pell and Joan Craddock.

Foerster stayed until 1959. By the time he left, the orchestra had grown to more than forty players, toured the island every year and was heard every week on the national network. He was succeeded by a series of shorter-serving conductors, most of them young Australians or Britons using Hobart as a step towards larger posts, and the orchestra spent much of the 1960s training conductors as much as being trained by them.

The Island Problem

For its first thirty years the orchestra lived under the threat of closure. Funding was tight, audiences were small and mainland critics returned at intervals to the question of whether a city of Hobart's size needed an orchestra of its own. At least twice in the 1950s and 1960s the Commission considered merging it with the Victorian orchestra across Bass Strait, and on both occasions a public campaign in Hobart and Launceston helped keep it alive.

The players adapted to the island's scale. They toured the north and north-west by bus, playing in school halls, churches and town halls in Launceston, Devonport and Burnie, and carried their own instruments onto the ferry when they played on the mainland. Most of them taught on the side, and for decades a large share of the island's children who learned an orchestral instrument were taught by a member of the orchestra. It made the orchestra unusually close to the community it served, and it meant that its players were known by name in a way that musicians in larger cities rarely were.

The collapse of the Tasman Bridge in January 1975 tested the arrangement. Several players lived on the eastern shore, and for more than two years they reached rehearsals by ferry or by a long detour north through Bridgewater. Rehearsals were rescheduled around the ferry timetable, and for one season the orchestra gave a series of free concerts in Bellerive and Lindisfarne for audiences who could no longer easily cross the river.

The orchestra's string players in those years included Geraldine Whitford, a violist who spent thirty years in the back desks of the viola section and later taught from her front room in Mount Stuart. Players like her were the orchestra's backbone: reliable, underpaid, and as important to its survival in the classroom as they were on the stage.

Fitzroy Place

The orchestra became fully professional in the 1970s. Salaries improved, the number of permanent players grew, and the Commission began to recruit nationally. Among the new members in 1970 was Robert Francis Harris, a Hobart-born violinist who had trained at the New South Wales State Conservatorium of Music after growing up backstage at the Theatre Royal, where his father had been a stagehand. He joined the second violins, moved to the firsts in 1976, and stayed for forty seasons.

In 1981 the orchestra appointed the conductor David Nicholls, who brought a more contemporary, audience-minded approach than his predecessors. He introduced film scores, family concerts and crossover programmes, and several long-serving players and subscribers objected loudly. Attendance rose anyway. Nicholls also programmed the orchestra's own players as composers. In 1984 he premiered Robert Harris's Derwent Nocturne for strings, which the orchestra played occasionally for the next twenty years.

The orchestra's soloists in those decades were often local. The Hobart pianist Rowena Hodgman, who had graduated from the Conservatorium in 1977, was invited to perform with the orchestra soon afterwards and appeared with it regularly through the 1980s and 1990s. Visiting soloists and conductors, meanwhile, found that a concert in Hobart often ended at someone's dining table.

From the middle of the 1980s, Robert Harris ran an informal string quartet with three colleagues from the music room of his house at 47 Fitzroy Place in Sandy Bay. It had no name and no fixed membership, and for twenty years it played salons, festivals, funerals and weddings, including the 1997 wedding reception of Robert's daughter, Sandra, at the Grand Chancellor. It was one of several chamber groups that grew out of the orchestra in those years, and the most durable.

A Hall of Its Own

For more than fifty years the orchestra had no permanent home. That changed in 2000, when the Federation Concert Hall opened on the Hobart waterfront beside the Grand Chancellor hotel. It gave the orchestra a purpose-built auditorium for the first time, with proper rehearsal rooms, storage and an acoustic designed for an orchestra rather than for a town meeting. Subscriptions rose sharply in the first seasons, and the players who had spent decades carting stands across the Town Hall stage were openly sentimental about it.

The new hall also tied the orchestra more closely to the Conservatorium, whose students began to attend rehearsals and play in the orchestra's education concerts. Several principal players taught there, and the Conservatorium's German-trained viola professor, Dieter Brandt, played with the orchestra as a guest principal in the early 2000s. For a generation of young Tasmanian musicians, the path ran from the Conservatorium to the Federation Concert Hall and, more often than in earlier decades, to London and back.

The orchestra's personnel turned over in the same years. In 1999 Daniel James Harris, Robert's son, a former child prodigy who had abandoned a solo career after a breakdown in Melbourne, joined as rehearsal pianist and keyboard player, and spent the following quarter-century at the orchestra's piano. In 2004 a young Hobart violinist, Elizabeth Anne Chen, came home from the Royal Academy of Music in London and joined the first violins, where she found herself sitting beside Robert. She married Daniel the following year.

In 2007 Elizabeth Harris was appointed concertmaster at the age of twenty-six, the youngest in the orchestra's history. The appointment was not universally popular. Two senior violinists had expected the chair, and one did not speak to her for most of a season. She was precise, decisive and unafraid of conductors, and under her leadership the string section became noticeably tighter and more confident. In 2008 the orchestra appointed Amelia Rothschild, a young violist back from the Royal Academy, to the viola section. Robert Harris retired at the end of the 2009 season.

Chamber Offshoots

In 2010 Elizabeth Harris formed a string quartet with three colleagues: Amelia Harrington, as Amelia Rothschild had become by the time of her marriage two years later, on viola, James O'Sullivan on second violin and Thomas Andersen on cello. They called themselves The Tasman Strings and rehearsed at first in Robert's music room at Fitzroy Place. The quartet lost most of its second year when James was badly injured in a hiking accident in 2011, and Elizabeth refused to replace him.

The Tasman Strings became the most visible of the orchestra's offshoots. They played churches, wineries, schools and funerals across the state, and in July 2018 played at the close of the seventh annual charity gala at the Museum of Old and New Art, where the local press described them simply as the orchestra's string quartet. They recorded Southern Echoes, an album of works by Tasmanian composers, in 2017, and collaborated with Aboriginal musicians and singers on Songs of Country in 2018. In November 2023 they played the early part of the evening at the housewarming of Jeffries Manor for its new owners, Jasper and Olivia Murphy.

The quartet's work reflected something the orchestra had always done. Its players taught, played in each other's homes, and turned up at the weddings and funerals of the city's families. In a city as small as Hobart, the orchestra's musicians were rarely more than one or two people away from anyone in the audience.

The Faulkner Years

In 2012 the orchestra appointed Lynette Faulkner as artistic director. Melbourne-born and a committed environmentalist, she stayed until 2021 and changed the orchestra more than anyone since Foerster. She commissioned new Australian work every season, built lasting collaborations with Aboriginal artists, and took the orchestra out of the concert hall into places it had never played. In 2015 she established the orchestra's annual Winter Festival, which brought dancers, chefs and visual artists into its programming and became a fixture of Hobart's cultural calendar.

Her most famous production was a staging of Mozart's Requiem in 2017 in a disused limestone quarry near Triabunna on the east coast. The orchestra played in coats and fingerless gloves as the light went, and the concertmaster later said she could barely feel her bow hand by the end. The performance was filmed and broadcast nationally, and it did more for the orchestra's reputation on the mainland than any recording it had made.

Not everyone approved. A group of long-standing subscribers complained that the orchestra was neglecting the classics for spectacle, and two significant donors withdrew their support in 2016 after a season heavy with new commissions. Faulkner did not change course. She argued, in a speech at the Winter Festival that year, that an island orchestra that only played Vienna would one day find it had no island audience left, and the subscription figures through the rest of her tenure largely bore her out.

The orchestra's players became public figures in those years. In 2014 Amelia Harrington played Walton's Viola Concerto as soloist with the orchestra. Two years later she developed severe tendinitis and spent most of 2016 on leave, and on her return the orchestra asked her to front a campaign on musicians' health, injury and performance anxiety that it ran in schools and in the national press. She was appointed principal viola in 2019, the year the orchestra toured New Zealand. James O'Sullivan, who had come back from his own hand injury, became a fixture of the orchestra's youth education programmes.

The Empty Hall

The pandemic closed the Federation Concert Hall in March 2020. Concerts were cancelled for months, casual players lost their income, and the orchestra moved what it could online. The Tasman Strings recorded a set of pieces in the empty hall that was released that year as Nightfall, and the orchestra's small ensembles played outside nursing homes and in the gardens of players' houses when the rules allowed. When audiences returned, they returned more slowly than the orchestra had hoped, and older subscribers in particular did not all come back.

Lynette Faulkner left in 2021 and was succeeded as artistic director and chief conductor by the Finnish conductor Henrik Saarinen, a quieter and more conservative musician who rebuilt the core classical repertoire and steadied the finances. The transition was not smooth. Internal documents leaked in 2022 revealed a serious dispute between management and musicians over programming priorities, and the brief suspension of several casual contracts led to public criticism and a strained season. The orchestra came through it with its subscription base intact and its reputation dented.

In 2023 it launched TSO Across the Strait, which sent quartets and small ensembles by light aircraft and ferry to rural primary schools on the north-west coast, King Island and Flinders Island. It was the most ambitious outreach programme in the orchestra's history, and it drew on the same instinct that had once sent its players around the island by bus.

The First Chair

On 15 March 2024 Elizabeth Harris was killed in a car accident on the Midland Highway north of Kempton, driving home from an afternoon masterclass and recital in Launceston. She was forty-three, and she had been concertmaster for seventeen years. The orchestra cancelled its concerts that weekend. At her funeral at St David's Cathedral, the three surviving members of The Tasman Strings played beside an empty chair, and most of the orchestra filled the pews behind them.

Later that year the orchestra established the Chen-Harris Young Strings Fellowship for young Tasmanian string players, an initiative Amelia Harrington helped to bring about. For more than a year the concertmaster's chair was filled by guest leaders and by the orchestra's associate concertmaster, and the string section went through what several players described as the hardest season of their careers. In 2025 the orchestra appointed a new concertmaster, the Melbourne-trained violinist Clare Moorhouse.

Robert Harris died in July 2025, aged eighty-one, at the end of a life that had run alongside the orchestra for more than half its history. At his funeral at St David's Cathedral, The Tasman Strings played together, with a guest first violinist, for the first time since Elizabeth's death. Daniel played the Steinway from Fitzroy Place.

An Island Orchestra

By 2026 the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra had fewer than fifty full-time players and remained one of the smallest professional orchestras in the country. It faced the same pressures as orchestras everywhere: an ageing audience, a shrinking pool of private donors and the constant threat of funding cuts. Its concerts in Hobart and Launceston still frequently sold out, and its recordings of twentieth-century Australian music were respected well beyond the island.

The 2026 season under Saarinen mixed the orchestra's core repertoire with the commissions and festival work Faulkner had begun. Clare Moorhouse led the violins in her second season. The Tasman Strings played a handful of concerts with guest first violinists, and the orchestra recorded its first album with its new concertmaster. Attendance in Launceston, where the orchestra had always been treated as a visitor of some importance, rose for the third year running.

Amelia Harrington led its violas. Daniel Harris still played for it when it needed a pianist. The Winter Festival, the school residencies and TSO Across the Strait carried on, and the Chen-Harris fellows played their first concerts with the orchestra that year. It was a chamber-sized orchestra with symphonic ambitions, shaped less by prestige than by the island it served, and its players were still, as they had been in 1948, people the city knew by name.