Omega Ensemble is back with a mixture of the new and the old

Two new works, one a world premiere, and a pocket edition of a great Romantic masterpiece formed the program for Omega Ensemble’s return to live music at Sydney Opera House.

Clemens Leske performing with Omega Ensemble at Sydney Opera House's Utzon Room. Picture: New Annual

• Easy to Handel Italian job
• Simone’s cup cake for Ludwig
• Chilling study of evil
• Dance to the music of time

Two new works, one of them a world premiere, and a pocket edition of a great Romantic masterpiece formed the program for Omega Ensemble’s return to live music at Sydney Opera House.

Artistic director David Rowden featured as soloist in the first work, Gordon Kerry’s Clarinet Quintet, at the sold-out afternoon concert in the Utzon Room – demand for this concert was so high that there was not a ticket to be had for the repeat performance in the evening.

Omega and Kim Williams, himself a keen clarinetist, commissioned the work from the Victorian composer and music writer in 2019 and the cancellation of the 2020 season due to COVID meant that it was given its world premiere as a digital concert at Sydney Opera House, followed by a public performance at a Sydney gallery.

Written in five continuous movements, Kerry wanted it to be a celebration of Rowden’s “lyricism and technical agility”, as well as the talents of other musicians in the ensemble.

The four string players – violinists Alexandra Osborne and Anna Da Silva Chen, violist Neil Thompson and cellist Paul Stender each figure prominently, especially in the fourth movement where they get solos in passages which fluctuate between the lyrical and mysterious and the edgy and ominous, before the clarinet restores calm to the restless strings in the final Grave movement.

FRUSTRATIONS

Omega’s flutist Sally Walker commissioned Elena Kats-Chernin six years ago to write Night And Now, a concerto for flute and orchestra. This Omega performance was the world premiere of the composer’s colourful and evocative arrangement for flute and string quartet.

Sally Walker performing with Omega Ensemble. Picture: New Annual

While writing it Kats-Chernin was thinking back to her childhood and growing up in the Soviet Union, incorporating folk tales and some of the frustrations of Soviet life – lack of products in the shops and endless queues.

It starts off slowly and darkly with folk tales of two contrasting nights – one in the forest and one in a bejewelled castle, with the latter requiring some virtuoso techniques from Walker. The second movement, about every day Soviet life, begins airily, as if Bach’s Badinerie had been re-purposed by Shostakovich, while the final movement involves a long unaccompanied flute solo before the ensemble kicks in with a lively Tarantella.

The impeccable quality of the playing in the first two works carried over to the last work, a piano quintet arrangement of Chopin’s Piano Concerto No. 1, featuring one of Australia’s finest soloists in Clemens Leske.

Chopin’s abilities as an orchestral writer have always been passionately debated, with some conductors and composers trying their hands at “improvements”. This reduced version, which would have been performed in the composer’s lifetime, highlights his mastery of counterpoint, and although it has to be said that in some of the stormier interchanges between strings and piano one felt the lack of orchestral oomph. The four players nevertheless gave it their all and Leske was on point throughout the three movements.

The long introduction before the piano’s first entry in the opening movement was an added bonus – a string quartet by Chopin, no less – and the irresistible Romanze of the second movement still worked its magic.

DETAILS

●CONCERT Omega Ensemble: Night and Now

●WHERE Sydney Opera House Utzon Room

●WHEN Saturday, February 27