Omega Ensemble’s vibrant virtuosos dance the night away

Jaw-dropping virtuosity, some catchy tunes and toe-tapping rhythms from a crack ensemble.

David Rowden and Omega Ensemble performing Ross Edwards’ new clarinet concerto at City Recital Hall. Picture: Jay Patel

• US maestro is back to heal our wounds
• In a league of their own
• So long Kronos, it's been good to know you
• Rise and shine for new stellar talent

Australia’s much-loved composer Ross Edwards must be particularly fond of the clarinet – and of Omega Ensemble’s David Rowden in particular – for he has written two concertos for the instrument.

His latest one, which marks his 80th birthday and was given its world premiere in Omega Ensemble’s latest concert, was composed for Rowden after Edwards heard him perform Aaron Copland’s Clarinet Concerto last year. The new work started out as a quintet, but Edwards said after hearing the Ensemble’s virtuosity he got “terribly excited and a bit carried away” and it ended up as a larger work.

“Reducing the immeasurable complexity of an ecosystem to a basic skeleton, which is then fleshed out with diverse cultural references, has been my preoccupation for much of my composing life,” Edwards says in the program notes.

Australian composer Ross Edwards takes a bow and birthday bouquet. Picture: Jay Patel

His music typically blends the sounds of the bush — particularly birds and insects, and in this case frogs — with ritual dance and the forces of nature. In the new piece the cross-cultural element is the Hindu deity Nataraja’s eternal dance within a flaming wheel.

This was a spectacular edge-of-the-seat performance of a work which shows all the drive, positivity and irresistible rhythms of all of Edwards’ music. The opening movement, Brillente, was a long solo cadenza for Rowden, his clarinet negotiating athletic leaps and long skipping runs with crystal clear articulation and prodigious breath control.

Vatche Jambazian’s piano then set up a strong rhythm, joined by the strings led by the indomitable violinist Veronique Serret, before Paul Stender’s cello then Meagan Turner’s viola asserted themselves with brief solo passages.

Parts of the slow middle movement had a bluesy nightclub feel from piano and strings, perhaps with a hint of Kurt Weill’s Weimar cabaret, as the wheel dance turned on and on.

The dance theme of the evening got off to a lively start with Strum, a folk music inspired work by New York composer Jessie Montgomery, its title coming from the repeated pizzicato strumming effects of the various strings, full of toe-tapping cross rhythms and catchy melodies that reminded this listener of some of the early Kronos world music records.

The second half of this concert erupted spectacularly with English violinist Thomas Gould’s jaw-dropping performance of Philip Glass’s The American Four Seasons Concerto. Composed in 2009, it was commissioned as a companion piece to Antonio Vivaldi’s celebrated work, although Glass, while borrowing some effects and techniques from the Baroque, says it is not a journey through the changing seasons and even leaves it up to the performer and listener to decided where one season ends and the other one starts. So it’s a very different approach from the more recent “reinventions” by English-German composer Max Richter.

I’m not a great fan of Glass, but this 40-minute concerto is a stunner – high on excitement and with little rest for the soloist who has to deliver four virtuosic solo cadenzas, or “songs”, and with plenty of rhythmical demands on the orchestra in the four movements.

Gould, who trained at the Royal Academy of Music in London and is in great demand both as a soloist and collaborator in classical and jazz ensembles, showed wonderful technique and a charismatic stage presence with the height of an AFL ruckman and an engaging and engaged personality to go with it.

The relentlessly driving rhythms and breakneck solos whipped the big audience into a frenzy. Gould was, of course, forced to come back for an encore – a peerless performance of the Preludio of J.S. Bach’s third violin partita. Phenomenal!

DETAILS

• CONCERT Omega Ensemble: Ecstatic Dances

• WHERE City Recital Hall

• WHEN June 20