The ASO has dubbed 2022 as “a season of perpetual emotion”, with managing director Vincent Ciccarello promising a diverse program that will “thrill, delight and excite, but also give pause to reflect, to ponder and to swoon”.

“We’ll continue our revelatory exploration of music by women composers; we’ll present some of the world’s most exciting musicians; and, of course, together with the new, there will be the orchestral music that audiences love to look forward to.”

The program will begin on February 11 and12 with the previously announced concert John Williams at 90, which celebrates the film composer’s 90^th birthday and see the orchestra perform scores from films including Harry Potter, Star Wars, Jaws, ET and Jurassic Park. In March, the orchestra will also present Prayer for the Living as part of the Adelaide Festival, and perform with oud virtuoso Joseph Tawadros at WOMADelaide.

There will be eight concerts throughout the year in the ASO’s flagship Symphony Series, featuring works by 24 different composers.

A new horn concerto by composer Paul Dean (commissioned by the ASO) will have its world premiere at the sixth Symphony Series concert, Tragedy to Triumph, in August. It was written for Adelaide-born musician Andrew Bain, who is now principal horn of the Los Angeles Philharmonic but will return to perform it.

Other new Australian works set to premiere in 2022 are jazz pianist and composer Joe Chindamo’s Ligeia (based on a short story by Edgar Allan Poe) – a concerto for ASO principal trombone Colin Pritchard that will be performed during Symphony Series 2, Affirmation, in May, and Cathy Milliken’s Earth Plays V: Ediacaran Fields, inspired by the SA Museum’s fossil display (Symphony Series 4, Serenity, June).

ASO conductor laureate Nicholas Braithwaite will conduct The Ring Without Words, described as “an orchestral compilation of the best-loved bits” of Wagner’s epic Ring Cycle, at a concert in July (Symphony Series 5, Spellbound), which will also include a selection of Richard Strauss’s orchestral songs, sung by soprano Nicole Car.

Following the success of the She Speaks mini-festival celebrating female composers last June, the orchestra is bringing back the event across two days in July next year. Composer Anne Cawrse and pianist and writer Anna Goldsworthy will curate a She Speaks II program including five concerts, a symposium and film screening.

In September, the orchestra will present Beethoven: The Symphonies – a series of four concerts over 12 days at the Town Hall that was originally to have been presented in 2020 to coincide with the 250^th anniversary of the composer’s birth, but had to be postponed that year and again this year due to the pandemic. It will be conducted by Beethoven specialist Douglas Boyd and feature all nine of his symphonies.

Popular presenter Guy Noble will conduct Last Night of the Proms at the Festival Theatre in April, and present three Classics Unwrapped shows throughout the year. The 2022 season also includes  two Sanctuary Series concerts at the Grainger Studio – where audiences are invited to “sit, recline or lie down on a mat” during the one-hour performances – and a finale performance of Handel’s Messiah in December, to be conducted by Erin Helyard with four vocal soloists and the Adelaide Chamber Singers.

See full details of the ASO’s 2022 season online.