Omega Ensemble’s French connection proves a diverting curtain-raiser

Sydney’s leading chamber group, Omega Ensemble, chose a diverting side trip to France as a curtain-raiser to its new season.

Omega Ensemble performing in Melbourne in the opening concert of its 2024 season. Picture: Laura Manariti

• Acrobatic Orpheus is a triumph of sight and sound
• Sliding door moments lead to Bach celebration
• Another gem from an Aussie foursome going places
• Mozart gets a reno through the past, brightly

Sydney’s leading chamber group, Omega Ensemble, chose a diverting side trip to France as a curtain-raiser to its 2024 season.

Outside The Neilson at Pier 2/3, Walsh Bay, it was a hot and humid Saturday afternoon, but inside it was all cool and chic with the acoustic of the ACO’s state of the art concert hall lending the three works on the program an enveloping intimacy.

Artistic director, clarinetist David Rowden and pianist Vatche Jambazian launched the afternoon with Claude Debussy’s Premiere Rhapsodie, a road test of a soloist’s technical abilities he had written for students in 1910 after he joined the Conservatoire de Paris. Over nine minutes he covers a lot of ground, both emotionally and technically, with a rich palette of colours and textures.

Rowden showed his full kitbag of skills with superb breath control and tonal beauty in the long flowing lines of the opening moments and playful acrobatics in the faster passages, all enhanced by Jambazian’s thoughtful and precise playing.

Debussy later rearranged the piece, calling it Rhapsody for Clarinet and Orchestra, and it was for a performance of this version with the Willoughby Symphony Orchestra in 2022 that clarinetist Oliver Shermacher commissioned Sydney composer Alice Chance to write a companion piece, which she called Echappsodie, and which Omega in turn commissioned her to rearrange for a chamber septet. It was the world premiere of this arrangement that closed the concert.

Chance, who is now based in Paris, was in the audience for the performance, which proved to be as much a tour de force concerto as the Debussy original. “If Debussy’s Premiere Rhapsodie is a wise and well-spoken grandfather, Echappsodie could be described as its cheekiest granddaughter,” Chance said.

Her work is twice as long and throughout its three movements the strings – two violins, viola, cello and double bass – and piano gradually start stealing the limelight from the clarinet, although it does not “go down without a fight”.

Chance captures Debussy’s playful moods and the result is a delightful chamber work, brilliantly realised by the group, and one that deserves to be regularly performed and, hopefully, recorded alongside the “grandfather” work.

The meat in the sandwich for this concert was Gabriel Faure’s Piano Quintet No. 1 in D Major, Op. 89, a lush 35-minute work which typifies Debussy’s view of the older composer and mentor as “the master of gracefulness”.

Jambazian drove the three movements with unerring taste and energy and in the opening moments, when the quintet often becomes a string quartet episodically, the cohesive sound of violinists Peter Clark and Natalia Harvey, violist Neil Thompson and Paul Stender’s cello proved irresistible.

The final allegretto movement had all the energy and excitement of a car chase through the French countryside. Magnifique!

DETAILS

• CONCERT Omega Ensemble Echappsodie

• WHERE The Nielson, Pier 2/3 Walsh Bay

• WHEN February 17