Gippsland Symphony Orchestra: Concert 3 — Community • Collaboration • Carmen

Gippsland Symphony Orchestra presents a concert celebrating community, collaboration and the enduring power of great music.

The concert begins with local composer and musician Kees Dogger’s Bairnsdale Suite, inspired by his arrival in Bairnsdale as a young French horn player and his long association with community music. With titles such as Fanfare, Horns Don’t Trill and Grumbles in the Basses, the work combines musical craftsmanship with warmth and humour, celebrating the characters, stories and experiences of regional music-making.

Next comes British composer Joseph Holbrooke’s Three Blind Mice Variations, a wonderfully inventive orchestral treatment of the familiar nursery rhyme. What begins as a simple children’s tune is transformed through contrasting variations into music that is playful, dramatic, lyrical and spectacular.

The concert then celebrates the up-and-coming young musicians of Gippsland. Young musicians from Crashendo, Dragonflies and the Gippsland Youth Symphony Orchestra will perform music they have been preparing and rehearsing before joining the GSO for a special side-by-side performance, bringing experienced and emerging musicians together on stage.

The concert concludes with Georges Bizet’s Carmen — a special GSO interpretation combining selected movements from Carmen Suites Nos. 1 and 2 into a continuous 30-minute orchestral journey.

You might think of it as the GSO Carmen Suite: our own concert sequence bringing together some of Bizet’s most famous and colourful music, from the Aragonaise and Habanera to the Toreador Song, Danse Bohème and spectacular Les Toréadors. Passion, seduction, danger, drama and celebration come together in a thrilling finale.

Community. Collaboration. Carmen.

A concert celebrating local composers, community musicians, emerging young talent and some of the most vibrant music in the orchestral repertoire.

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