On 4 June the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra and Ingrid Martin give the Australian debut of Doreen Carwithen’s lively concert opener Overture “ODTAA”. Published by Faber Music in 2024, the Overture has also recently been performed by Timothy Redmond and the London Symphony Orchestra, the Iceland Symphony Orchestra with Andrew Manze, and the Gulbenkian Orchestra and Clemens Schuldt. The work also featured at the 2022 Last Night of the Proms, with the BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by Dalia Stasevska.
Overture “ODTAA” was written when Carwithen was aged only 23 and premiered by Adrian Boult and the London Philharmonic Orchestra in 1947. Its subtitle – ‘One Damn Thing After Another’ – is named for the 1926 novel by John Masefield, an adventure story set on a fictional island nation in Central America, in which the hero of the stories is caught up in various wild escapades and political intrigues with a vivid cast of characters.
Carwithen’s 8½-minute piece captures this questing atmosphere of derring-do and swashbuckling with rhythmic vitality and orchestral brilliance, the music driven forward by energetic interjections from the percussion, brilliant passagework for strings, and fanfares for the brass. In this respect the piece shares the vigour and pictorial sharpness of Carwithen’s film scores, several of which have been adapted into concert works – such as To the Public Danger and Men of Sherwood Forest. The Overture was recorded by Richard Hickox and the London Symphony Orchestra in 1997.
The Australian debut of the Overture follows the 2025 premiere of Doreen Carwithen’s Concerto for Piano and Strings with Melbourne Chamber Orchestra and Aura Go, which appeared at the Melbourne Recital Centre last July. The concerto follows a traditional three-movement pattern and sees Carwithen blend lithe neoclassicism with lyrical effusiveness. In her later years, Carwithen’s rich catalogue of works began to gain wider recognition. Her story is told in Leah Broad’s acclaimed recent study “Quartet”, published by Faber & Faber, alongside those of Ethel Smyth, Dorothy Howell and Rebecca Clarke.