Omega Ensemble’s Mozart night is grand affair
It was a case of Gone with the Wind when Sydney’s Omega Ensemble dished up Mozart’s Gran Partita at the City Recital Hall.
It was a case of Gone with the Wind when the audience turned up for Sydney’s Omega Ensemble’s first concert of the season at the City Recital Hall Angel Place and rounded off the evening with Mozart’s magnificent serenade, Gran Partita.
The work for 12 wind instruments and double bass was the highlight of the night.
Husband and wife co-artistic directors David Rowden and Maria Raspopova split Omega Ensemble’s season between the intimate surrounds of the Opera House’s Utzon Room and the more formal concert hall setting of Angel Place.
For the concerts at the City Recital Hall, in the ensemble’s Virtuoso series, they usually devise a grander program — later in the year, for example, they are tackling a chamber setting of Mahler’s Symphony No. 1, something to look forward to.
This first Virtuoso all-Mozart offering of the season was no exception. The Gran Partita was composed, like many of his serenades, to be played outdoors as the backdrop to some official ceremony.
DOVETAILING
But before we got to that piece we saw Omega in stripped back mode for a performance of Mozart’s irresistible Quintet for Piano and Winds, a work of which the composer was extremely proud.
There is justification for this as with Raspopova’s piano driving the action and Rowden’s clarinet bouncing off Celia Craig’s oboe, Mark Gaydon’s bassoon and Michael Dixon’s horn merrily chipping in, it is a wonderful piece, full of solo runs and neat dovetailing ensemble work, all designed to show off the late 18th century’s newly improved wind instrument technology.
Raspopova was back to close the first half with a somewhat patchy performance of the piano sonata No. 11, with its famous Rondo alla Turca final movement.
These two works served as enjoyable curtain raisers to the main fare of the evening.
In Peter Shaffer’s entertaining but notoriously inaccurate play Amadeus the older composer Antonio Salieri seethes with envy at the beauty and genius of the Gran Partita — especially the gorgeous adagio movement — adding that it is as if “God was singing through this little man”.
Over the next 50 minutes Rowden and his troops — doubled clarinets, oboes, basset horns, bassoons and four french horns with bassist Alex Henery’s steady hand on the rein behind — served up a sizzling performance.
The lively allegro, allegrettos and the zany rondo finale — surely this has been used as a soundtrack to the Keystone Cops? — were dispatched with all the tightness and panache of a top-class jazz big band.
And that miraculous adagio — the introduction for which was described by composer Pierre Boulez as “a moment of genius … so wonderful, so mysterious” — was the icing on the cake.
DETAILS
● CONCERT: Omega Ensemble
● WHERE: City Recital Hall Angel Place
● WHEN: Tuesday, April 10
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