Month: August 2025

ELEVATOR MUSIC

Omega Ensemble

Elisabeth Murdoch Hall, Melbourne Recital Centre

Saturday August 15, 2025

Michael Collins

A Sydney-based group, the Omega Ensemble presents as a moveable feast of artists. For this segment of its national tour, the group comprised string players, alongside some crypto-strings/percussion in piano (Vatche Jambazian) and harp (Paul Nicolaou), with artistic director David Rowden contributing his clarinet to one work. As the Omegas’ guest, Michael Collins brought his clarinet to the stage for the brief evening’s two major works, demonstrating his expertise and interpretative flair with deceptive ease and making something substantial out of an odd scrappy program.

To begin, the Omega strings gave themselves a throat-clearer with the first movement to Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik of 1787. Well, it also gave us a chance to get used to the body’s weighting of 4-4-3-2-2 which, from my seat, gave the bass line of this quartet an unexpected prominence. Not that you could complain about such a teaser which made for a congenial tuning-in exercise. As usual, the group overdid the dynamic contrasts well beyond anything the composer would have entertained, but they’re not alone in that. They repeated the exposition, which never fails to be a pleasing 55 bars to re-experience.

American writer Anna Clyne‘s Stride for string orchestra followed. Its three movements employ the melodic and sometimes the harmonic path of Beethoven’s Pathetique Piano Sonata No. 8, albeit with plenty of filler. Apparently, the composer found a similarity between the bass octaves at the first movement’s switch to Allegro di moto e con brio and the stride technique utilised by ragtime pianists; can’t really see it myself, but the shoe obviously fits for Clyne. Mind you, that all becomes irrelevant when she moves on to the second and third movements, the last being most direct of the three in utilizing Beethoven.

This is not the sort of music to stop you in your tracks through its level of inventiveness or novelty of timbres; it’s just akin to hearing the sonata referenced in a mushy web, a kind of filtered Beethoven at an unsettling remove from the original because of the transcription to strings. But it misfired for me because even Clyne’s changes of harmony accompanying the original melodies were ordinary. I suspect that the work’s success in performance relies on the style of attack adopted, which might have been more interesting in the hands of its original commissioners – the Australian Chamber Orchestra, which premiered it in 2020. Added to this, the bass component across the final rondo again overwhelmed whatever was happening upstairs.

We then came to the new double concerto by Australian composer Graeme Koehne called Dances on the Edge of Time, which title emanates from a Tagore poem and which to me promised something along the lines of Messiaenesque mysticism or perhaps a touch of Bengali complexity. But no: Koehne has produced a simple set of three dances – rigaudon, chaconne, gigue – which contain no terrors for players or audience, written in a happy diatonic style that is instantly accessible and free from any pretensions to depth or gravity.

Adding to this piece’s popular backdrop, Koehne heads each movement with a quote from the collected wisdom of either Randall G. Leighton (the American business analyst?), Mark Twain or Satchell Paige (a renowned baseball player). For the opening rigaudon, the instruction or life-message was ‘Work like you don’t need the money’, exemplified by a retrograde-sounding piece in four-square rhythm that called to mind Grainger and Holst in what sounded to be G Major, the two front-of-band clarinets indulging in some jaunty interplay and mimesis.

‘Love like you’ve never been hurt’ was the preliminary advice for Koehne’s chaconne in which I became aware of the harp’s timbre for the first time. For these pages, I thought that the prevailing tonality was D Major; or may be not as I’m finding it increasingly hard to claim having absolute pitch any more and trying to pick out tonality from finger positions is a mug’s game at best. Whatever the case, we enjoyed a few eliding slides into other keys while the cantus firmus moved from treble to bass across the movement’s stretch with a clean fluidity, even if the players didn’t seem to find much excitement needed to be summoned up while conveying these placid A-River-Runs-Through-It pages. Again, I sensed no strain in the output of Collins or Rowden while presenting this lush and predictable slow movement.

With the gigue, we were in unsteady territory at first with a clarinet duet that eventually settled into the expected 6/8 pulse. Here again the music occupied an ‘open’ key – C Major? – that moved into harmonically unchallenging episodes before the catchy main tune slowed down for a more drawn-out statement of its elements: a gentle and soulful interlude with the strings given the main burden while the clarinets sublimated themselves in attention-grabbing burbles. Back to the fast jig tempo and we reached a happily contentment-inducing cadence, all illustrating that timeless adage, ‘Dance like nobody’s watching.’

The composer is not concerned in this work with confronting anything that’s driven the art forward or into detours and culs de sac over the last century. His vocabulary throughout the new double concerto rarely moves beyond that employed by the English pastoralists. Further, he keeps his soloists well in hand with very little room for virtuosic flourishes, content to give them aural prominence among their support colleagues. To my mind, the work is congenial enough but not in the least bit ground-breaking. The program notes for this concert speak of Koehne pursuing a ‘neoclassical kind of aesthetic’ – but there’s no need for the neo qualifier.

As far as I could tell, the rather sparse audience (250? 300?) reacted favourably to this exercise, and I suppose that its reception can be viewed as a success, even if a few of us were nonplussed by the work’s innate conservatism, given the Omegas’ motto: Embrace the unexpected. Celebrate the extraordinary. Not with this work, commissioned by the ensemble itself.

To end, Collins took the lead for Copland’s Clarinet Concerto of 1947-9. As far as I can see, he has produced only one recording of this famous work – a Swedish Chamber Orchestra collaboration released in 2013 – as opposed to the three versions he has produced of Finzi’s less well-travelled concerto. You could find much to relish in the opening slow movement, in particular Collins’ ability to give us a crescendo–decrescendo set of sequences that remained sensible, not straining the barriers of taste and sense. This atmospheric consequent of Appalachian Spring‘s placid stretches maintains its eloquence, even if it does suggest a Meditation on the Prairie ambience.

At last, we came to some hectic playing in Copland’s cadenza where the composer anticipates the coming action. In spite of the sudden heating-up, Collins gave us a sensible and ordered account of this 70-plus bar extravaganza that tests any interpreter’s agility and self-control. Not a squawk or a misdirect to be heard here as the soloist joined up with his Omega colleagues for the jazz- and Latin-inflected finale. Here you felt the lack of violins once again, even from further back in the Murdoch Hall, because of a lack of aggression as the syncopations piled up and some rhythmic anxiety appeared in the rear echelons.

As the freneticism continued, it struck me that Jambazian might have been well advised to have his piano-lid down or off; this instrument’s colour proved very prominent in the movement’s centre. Still, Collins dominated the terrain, not least when Copland exercised his heavy jazz tongue, as at bar 297 with the bass semi-pizzicato slaps while the clarinet saunters across the room. I wasn’t happy about the penultimate bar’s glissando up to the final unison C for everybody but you’d expect that the players will have coordinated that to better effect for tonight’s Sydney and Thursday’s Newcastle performances of this program.

Looking over the Omega appearances past and future for this year, it’s very clear that the body is a solid supporter of new music; its list of previous commissions is the most impressive and all-inclusive I’ve seen in this country from any serious chamber music enterprise. Most of us interested in new developments might have our expectations better fulfilled in the body’s final Melbourne appearance this year which features Bartok’s 1938 Contrasts (like the Copland concerto, another commission by Benny Goodman and still more challenging than anything we heard on this Elevator Music program), Nigel Westlake’s Rare Sugar clarinet concertino of 2007, and a new work from Sydney-based writer Ell;a Macens.

GERSHWIN & SHOPSTAKOVICH

Australian Chamber Orchestra

Hamer Hall, Arts Centre Melbourne

Sunday August 10, 2025

Alexander Gavrylyuk

In some ways, this afternoon’s event impressed for the breadth of its span in emotional content. Richard Tognetti and his Australian Chamber Orchestra performed three works that exposed their talent for breathing fresh life into a near-classic and giving two newer scores every opportunity to stake their claims for inclusion here. It might have had a lot to do with the age and predispositions of this particular audience but it struck me that the opening gambit in this concert made less of a case for itself than its companion while the program’s final work exercised its usual impact of uplifting despair.

For starters, we heard Zipingu by Canadian writer Claude Vivier, written for thirteen strings; I counted fifteen in the ACO ranks but you can’t have modernity (awkwardly, the piece is 45 years old) without flexibility. Sadly, I’ve not seen the score of Zipingu – a word used in Marco Polo’s time to refer to Japan – but its chief characteristics indicate that colour is the main objective. Vivier intended a kind of pan-Asian atmosphere, in which he achieved no little success with, as far as I could see, nobody attempting a vibrato throughout although tremolando proved king as a sound source.

For all its supporting polemic, Zipangu worked on this listener as a sort of musical diuretic as it lacked most of the connectors that your average Western concert-goer expects, or clings to. The composer’s canvas is full of incident but nothing stays with you and the absence of investment in the individual note – simply sounding it without much intellectual impulse, as if applying white to a white canvas – made this fifteen minutes or so quite challenging. I’m assuming that Vivier was seeing his Japan flat-on, without embellishment and the invitation was for us to absorb an abstract sequence of disparate shades.

As for the following Moments of Memory (VI) by Valentin Silvestrov, a Ukrainian composer who fled from Kiev to Germany when the Russians began the latest phase of their invasion, the ACO performed this world premiere (the organization had a hand in commissioning it) with assured ease. Still, little remains in this particular memory about a set of seven movements that melded into each other. It presented as a type of cafe music, a series of waltzes that might have been reminiscences of life in Ukrainian cities before disaster and drones made the composer’s homeland unliveable. Not that Silvestrov struck a tragic level and confronted us with suffering; his memory proved melancholy but warm, especially as vibrato had rarely made such a welcome comeback.

At the program’s end, Tognetti led his forces through Shostakovich’s Chamber Symphony in C minor, the 1964 arrangement by Rudolf Barshai of the composer’s String Quartet No. 8 which was written four years earlier. This was splendid work, the performance notable for its final two slow movements that gradually sink to that individual gloom that the composer made his own: the Largo that ends the composition one of the bleakest resolutions in Western music. Of course, this work would have been at the performers’ fingertips as they released a new CD of it in February this year, although the recording sessions date from 2021.

Yet again, the ACO demonstrated its depth of expertise and accomplishment by a vitally emphatic account of the Allegro molto second movement, clear-speaking in its crisp chord slashes and the power underpinning group statements of its single-line melodies. Likewise, the players managed to bring out the chameleonic nature of the middle Allegretto which seems innocent, almost simple-minded, but teeters on the brink of despair as its overt insouciance alternates with bitter vehemence, concord and discord masterfully balanced until the aggressive attacca opening of the finale.

From there it’s all downhill through the second Largo which, in this orchestral version, bears witness to Shostakovich’s inner torture. You can say what you like about the composer’s naivete in Russia’s political sphere and, if you like, share in the derision heaped on him by other Western composers who lived under no restrictions. But, when it comes to baring the soul’s dark places, nobody equals this composer who shows you a world of dour resignation which is, in the end, an affirmation of stern nobility.

Which made it all the more understandable that Tognetti interpolated a brief pause in these final pages when audience coughing proved intrusive. This was nothing you could blame on the unthinking young because the blight of expectorations and catarrh clearances were clearly produced by some of the elderly patrons in Hamer Hall who have forgotten (if they ever knew) the lessons of COVID and the benefits of masking your breathing difficulties. The ACO leader was too kind in waiting for these self-absorbed geriatrics, especially while in the process of constricting a profoundly moving experience; I’m just surprised (and grateful) that he didn’t walk off, taking his earnest colleagues with him.

Mind you, this work worked in several ways alongside displaying the ensemble’s gift for outlining an emotionally concentrated score like this one. It offered a sharp contrast with Silvestrov’s regretful farewell to things past; along with the personal trauma experienced by the Russian master, you cannot forget that part of the quartet’s impetus came from the composer’s visit to Dresden and the sight of that city still recovering from the fire-bombing of mid-February, 1945. The work commemorates a cataclysm while the Ukrainian writer seems to be memorializing a never-to-be-regained vision of his native land..

As well, the Chamber Symphony moved us into a different sphere, following as it did a dazzling performance by Alexander Gavrylyuk of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue of 1924, a brilliant compilation of jazz-inflected piano solos linked, after that unforgettable opening clarinet solo, by big-band tutti passages. My standard for this work is the Bernstein recorded performance of 1959 with the Columbia Symphony which still raises the spirit for its breadth of vision and force of character. Gavrylyuk came close to this level with a muddle-free approach to the orchestra-supported solos, the piano ever clear throughout, and with an awareness of the exhibitionism, the bravura that an interpreter has to contribute to succeed across the score’s span.

Given the ACO’s personnel constraints, an arrangement was made for strings, trumpet (David Elton) and piano by Bernard Rofe, the organization’s artistic planning manager. That opening sort-of-glissando run was given to the trumpet which played a sterling role in making up for the missing woodwind and brass ranks from Grofe’s orchestration, and the ACO strings welcomed the chance to soar through the big E Major tune at No 28 in the old two-piano edition. But, despite everyone’s best intentions, the band/orchestral backing fell short in terms of timbre and bite, especially in that jubilant final cakewalk.

Before interval, Gavrylyuk and Elton fronted the Shostakovich Piano Concerto No. 1, all forces producing a reading of immaculate clarity, even in the final frantic galop. The pianist and trumpeter made a fine fist of their first real collaboration at No 8 in the Muzyka edition; controlled but headlong in its forward thrust and almost mellifluous when the tonality hits E flat Major. Gavryluk showed no hesitation (if the occasional touch of rubato) when handling the brilliant passagework of this first movement, particularly brilliant in the top-of-the-keyboard register, picking out the melodic line with pointillistic precision.

Elton gave a lucid account of the second movement’s trumpet solo beginning at Number 34. It’s a startling moment in this Lento, the instrument muted (who isn’t?) and spinning out its commentary in well-etched exposure above the strings’ murmuring 3/4 – more a pavane than a waltz – accompaniment. I suppose the Moderato that follows acts as a circuit-breaker after the subdued nature of the slow movement’s E minor fade-to-black. Its two-part invention opening devolves into another plaint for the strings, which serves as another red herring before the piano launches into the concluding Allegro con brio where exhilaration reaches its apex in this work.

Yes, there are moments when you think that the composer’s thumb-to-the-nose humour seems like overkill, as at that famous splat-chord in the middle of an Italianate trumpet solo nine bars after Number 63, or the rich supply of ‘wrong’ notes in the rage-over-a-lost-penny cadenza for piano that precedes the final Presto at Number 72,not to mention that extraordinary deviation to a mittel-European folk-stomping piano solo at Number 76. But the persistence with a military-inspired cadence right up to the final bar still presents as a sparkling piece of musical cheek, here briskly carried off by soloists and their quicksilver support.

I got the impression that the ACO members admired Gavrylyuk and his impressive commitment to the task, whether striking sparks in the 1933 piano-and-trumpet opus or weltering through America’s exemplary fusion of jazz and serious music. For some time, he has impressed me as a musician with very broad shoulders, capable of taking on many challenges and forging a triumph out of each one. You’d have to hope that his next appearance with this ever-ambitious ensemble will not be too far off.