The orchestra’s new ‘find’ is the young Austrian-Spanish conductor Teresa Riveiro Böhm, whose bravery and heart won much admiration in her debut appearance.

Faced with some really big scores and seasoned professionals around her, she was a model of composure and meticulous commitment.

A little background might be needed on this 31-year-old, whose conducting career effectively began only in 2018. Riveiro Böhm shifted from playing the violin to choral conducting in Vienna, and from there she took out the prestigious Neeme Järvi Prize in Switzerland in 2019. Meanwhile, a fellowship at the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra has led to a clutch of career breaks in the UK. And now she is visiting Australia for the first time.

Teresa Riveiro Böhm in her debut performance with the ASO. Supplied image

Ravel’s Mother Goose suite made an enchanting first impression, with a gently restrained, graceful performance that conveyed this work’s picturesque fairy tale innocence. Having been a children’s piano piece before Ravel orchestrated it, this suite is full of glowing flute and clarinet melodies that portray the storybook characters of Sleeping Beauty and Little Tom Thumb. Using small but clear gestures, Riveiro Böhm imparted a lovely floaty quality to each of its scenes.

This performance caught people by surprise too, when extremely realistic birdcalls issued from solo violin and flutes in Petit Poucet, where Tom Thumb leaves a trail of breadcrumbs for birds to gather. Ravel, the most skilled and imaginative of orchestrators, always had clever tricks up his sleeve. His opera L’enfant et les sortilèges contains even greater enchantments, and we really must hear that in Adelaide one day.

Around the same time that audiences were first treated to the Mother Goose suite, an ambitiously young Prokofiev launched his Piano Concerto No. 1, and Stravinsky entranced Paris with his Firebird ballet music. In fact, it was within a couple of years that all this happened, in 1910-1912; this conjunction of extraordinary creativity in the pre-war years was another aspect that made this program so interesting.

Both terse and mesmerising, the Prokofiev can be a tough listen under normal circumstances. Some commentators described it at the time as “musical mud” and the product of a madman, and indeed this concerto’s compressed form seems to burst with a bewildering array of ideas. Here though, in the Town Hall, the circumstances were anything but normal. Alexander Gavrylyuk, the Ukrainian-born and Sydney-based piano virtuoso, is something else with Russian music, as we’ve witnessed before with his Rachmaninov – in 2016 he was phenomenal in Rachmaninov’s First Piano Concerto with the ASO.

Here was playing of the greatest involvement and conviction. All the elements of this steroidal concerto came into focus: its sprays of glittering sparkle, swirling rhythms and broiling emotion made complete artistic sense with Gavrylyuk’s wonderful pianism.

Simultaneously, one had to admire the wonderfully cool-headed Riveiro Böhm. Leading the orchestra with precise, deft gestures of hand and baton, she brought assurance and clean, tidy structure to this work – Prokofiev seems to have been aiming for precisely this in his concertos (and of course in his ‘Classical’ Symphony), in contrast to the roaming romanticism of Rachmaninov.

The ASO during ‘Exhilaration’ last night. Supplied image

There was no way after this that Gavrylyuk could escape without offering at least one encore, and a divine performance of Chopin’s Nocturne No.8 in D flat major showed the complete artist that he is. Supple and poetic, it was pure Chopin.

An unfamiliar name, Grażyna Bacewicz was a Polish violinist and composer who studied, like so many did, under Nadia Boulanger; she was one of the first women in her country to achieve wide recognition for writing concert works. Her Overture of 1943 is a work of brandishing power of almost cinematic proportions. In particular, it gives the violins a terrific workout, and under Riveiro Böhm it was fast and riveting.

Firebird was the score that first brought Stravinsky international fame, and yet it is the three suites that he wrote later on, rather than the original full-length ballet, that audiences are most familiar with today. Of those three, it tends to be the 1919 version that is most frequently performed. So it is always good to hear the longer one he wrote in 1945, which incorporates music for several additional pantomime scenes.

This was a well-controlled performance that satisfyingly brought to life Firebird’s captivating magic. Its feathery textures and profound mysteries were all there to savour. It still defies belief that the 28-year-old Stravinsky, with just a handful of minor works behind him, could have come up with astonishingly beautiful, original music – only to apparently repudiate it three years later in Rite of Spring. But the truth is that Firebird contains rhythmic innovations that foreshadow that later, more revolutionary work; and this performance certainly brought it home in the slam of cymbal and bass drum that punctuates The Infernal Dance of King Kastcheri. It fairly made some audiences members jump (at least one did in the row behind me).

Again, one could admire Riveiro Böhm’s thorough preparation for this performance. She possesses an exemplary technique, a very keen musical understanding, and the coolest temperament. Full praise too to the ASO for its superb playing throughout this concert. These wonderful musicians rally behind their conductor and always seem to bring out the best on every occasion.

This performance was on Thursday, October 13, at the Adelaide Town Hall. The concert is performed again tonight (October 14).