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Elisabeth Murdoch Hall, Melbourne Recital Centre |
Pursuing its latest two-state tour, the Omega Ensemble from Sydney presented a hefty program on Monday evening, all in one swoop without interval. Luckily for everyone, the music we heard (apart from the opening piece) proved to be involving and generally animated, with two concertos in succession after an arrangement by Mahler for strings of Schubert’s String Quartet No. 14, Death and the Maiden. As for personnel, the Ensemble gathered together eleven strings – six violins (including two guests), two each of violas and cellos, one (guest) double-bass – alongside the body’s soloist regulars, clarinet David Rowden and piano Vatche Jambazian. |
As for that beginner, the Omegas performed Soliloquy by American John Corigliano, arranged in 1995 to commemorate his father who was concertmaster of the New York Philharmonic for over 20 years. To this filial end, the composer has apparently recycled the central movement from his 1977 Clarinet Concerto for smaller forces: the clarinet, of course, and string quartet, which in this instance featured (I’m guessing) violins Emma McGrath and Asmira Woodward-Page, viola Neil Thompson, and cello Paul Stender. |
Soliloquy is a successful elegy, intertwining and contrasting the clarinet and first violin line in an emotional landscape that is restrained and yet quietly eloquent. Corigliano’s content is spare and focused, my main memory being of upward-moving arpeggio figures for nearly all participants which brought to mind the opening row statement in Berg’s Violin Concerto. As well, the composer reaches a carefully judged conclusion, the melodic threads fading to silence from both McGrath and Rowden: a final fade to black. |
The full complement of strings assembled for the Schubert/Mahler monument. I think that most of us would have experienced an orchestral reading of this work from the Australian Chamber Orchestra which has taken Richard Tognetti’s arrangement on tour here and overseas. Inevitably, the Omega players lacked the mobility and striking accuracy of the ACO in full flight but it was difficult to find faults in Monday night’s reading, apart from some momentary lapses from the top violin line which, to be fair, is put under most stress during this score. |
In their attack, this ad hoc body displayed fine definition right from the initial D minor gestures. As well, the players had been carefully prepared for the arranger’s dynamic differentiations and endlessly mobile ebb and flow of phrasing across the opening Allegro. The 140-bars of exposition weren’t repeated but, in a large-frame work like this, with its concentrated material, I don’t suppose we missed it. |
Schubert’s treatment of his own song in the second movement set of variations swerves from bleak to dulcet to aggressive in a moving emotional canvas that is packed with great moments. Here, we heard some solo lines as the body wasn’t large enough to follow Mahler’s reduction of some first violin sections to three desks. And the use of mutes made for some fine alterations in texture, especially from the lower lines. My only complaint came with a bar or two of scruffy intonation from the first violins when the lied re-emerges at the movement’s end. |
With the third movement, the players enjoyed the heft of the quasi-boisterous Allegro molto with its signature syncopations, all of them making a solid and uniform attack on its outer bars, before the move into sentiment with the D Major Trio. In spite of an appealing curvaceousness in the first violins here, I admired more the warm-timbred duet of violas and cellos betweeen bars 84 and 100, and the second violins’ chance to shine at bar 140, which kind of demonstrated that group of three’s higher success rate at playing piano (a prominent pianissimo, actually) than their ‘first’ colleagues. |
With the Presto conclusion to this quartet, you were faced with the expected pell-mell rush right through whole pages; none of that ACO habit of shaping the phrases with mini-hesitations and pseudo-pauses which also gives you variety in attack and heightens your expectations. This was a (generally) straight-through run of high energy with a firm support from violas, cellos and the single double-bass Adrian Whitehall, although what struck me on several occasions was the pentrating power of violas Thompson and Andrew Jezek coupled with our cellists Stender and Mee Na Lojewski in exposed bars like 238 to 241, exposed briefly in mid-tumult. |
Capping their performance, these string players welded into a taut composite for the 46 (47) bars of Prestissimo that conclude the work with a resolute vehemence that remains in the memory long after the music has stopped, What you might have missed out on in subtleties of inflection and searing uniformity of articulation from an ACO reading, you were compensated by the directness of address and emotional commitment from this Omega group, playing with six muscians less than Tognetti’s champions. |
Before we reached the next piece, a noticeable number of older listeners left the Murdoch Hall, apparently not interested in the later program elements. Well, they missed some fine music-making through their small-minded abstention. American composer Jessie Montgomery‘s Rounds amounts to a one-movement piano concerto, Jambazian doing the honours with the 11-strong complement of available strings. The work opened with a full-bodied chain of short blows as prelude to the main theme of this rondo. Jambazian also outlined his part with a percussive zeal that I hadn’t encountered in other readings. |
Indeed, the pianist found a violent layer in this score that served to act as both spur and complement to the strings, the forward motion eventually settling into an appealing nocturne for the piano while his accompaniment eventually comprised the repetition of a fixed strand. Montgomery also introduced a sound-making device that I think required her strings to play/scrape above the bridge; still unsettling when you first hear it but effective in breaking up the semi-sweetness of this work’s central pages. |
Finally, we heard a new Australian work in Paul Stanhope‘s Paludarium Dreams for clarinet, piano and strings – in other words, everybody who’d participated so far this night. The composer was present and joined Omega artistic director Rowden for one of those brief pre-performance explications that was probably of assistance to those who hadn’t read the program notes or who didn’t know anything about Stanhope’s life and work. |
The concerto begins with a movement called In Flight – bird sounds using those glissandi and short sound wisps that pop up in Sculthorpe’s music. As a soundscape, it made remarkably persuasive listening for us, even if specific bird calls would have escaped those of us who are ornithologically challenged. Mind you, there is no attempt to directly write out specific cries; no Oiseaux exotiques excursions into exact duplication. The landscape of noises changes into more broad strophes as Stanhope moves through his sanctuary while his vocabulary is comfortable without venturing too far from something approaching traditional tonality. |
After a jubilant outburst of musical pantheism, the birds return and we strike on a Nocturne, prefaced by frog croaks and more of those above-the-bridge scrapes from the strings. The atmosphere is not placid and takes on the nature of a scherzo occasionally; Stanhope’s idea of a night-piece is more in line with Bartok than with Chopin. Rowden produced some impressive amphibious noises although what struck me most throughout this movement was the prominence of Jambazian’s part, both forceful and recessive by turns. |
The third movement, The Carollers, begins with a clarinet cadenza of substance, a fine show-piece for Rowden’s control of register and rapidity of attack. When the ensemble enters, we are in a more urban environment and the work’s metrical motion has moved into something more jagged, less free-flowing or rhapsodic as had been the case towards the end of the previous segment. I know we enjoyed Stanhope’s employment of nature sounds, but here the work moved into being driven by effects rather than growing a world out of them; a hectic series of yelps and high notes presented the city (Sydney) to this listener as more disordered and discordant than it actually is (or is it, these days?). Rowden enjoyed another cadenza-of-sorts near the score’s conclusion, where those Parramatta River birds are heard once more. |
Stanhope’s new work is a solid contribution to the small catalogue of Australian clarinet concertos, even if the piano element is often just as present a force in the score’s lay-out. Further, it provided a generous self-revelatory conclusion to this evening which focused intently on the psychological make-up of its contributor-composers: from Corigliano’s tribute to the voice of his father, to Schubert’s intense and stark confrontation with his own mortality, to the concision Montgomery shows in finding eloquence through a fusion of poetry and music, ending in Stanhope’s outlining of his physical world and how he posits himself in it. |
A rewarding event, then, and another instance of the Omegas’ catholicity of output. Certainly, the enterprise deserves a larger audience than it currently attracts, let alone one that stays the course for its full program. We all hope for better times and, in this admittedly parlous state, would welcome more patrons to visit future events mounted by these gifted visitors from the not-so-deep North. |
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