Month: December 2025

Diary January 2026

cliveoconnell

FESTIVAL OPENING CONCERT – GLORIA!

Ballarat Organs & Fine Music Festival

St Patrick’s Cathedral

Friday January 9 at 7 pm

It’s all different up the Western Freeway since I’ve been away in the north. This festival has undergone a name change as well as a revamp in administration with long-time artistic directors Sergio di Pieri and Judith Houston gone, replaced by gamba exponent Laura Vaughan. As well, the time-line has been compressed so that it now runs for half of its previous length. And the geography has closed in so that events are limited to the city of Ballarat, with two day-time events in both Clunes and Creswick – nothing to the south. And the number of concerts/recitals has shrunk to 12, with the Festival al fresco Breakfast continuing as an extra-numerary. As usual, we have a celebratory opening event which this year involves the Consort of Melbourne, Consortium of viols, Unholy Rackett, with Donald Nicholson playing harpsichord and Nicholas Pollock on theorbo; Steven Hodgson, the Consort’s director, seems to be in charge of this amalgamation. No specifics are available but the names of Schutz, Hassler and Praetorius are being bandied around, with the promise of multi-choral polyphony. The concert lasts for 70 minutes, promising an early night for everybody – a welcome relief for this largely local audience. Students pay $10, concession holders $35, adults $45; if you want the post-concert supper, it’s $10 extra. The booking fee ranges for 75 cents to $1.88 – so why is this impost so cheap in the country and so monstrously expensive in Melbourne?

THE SINGING PIPES – MUSIC OF HANDEL, BACH, HAYDN & BEYOND

Ballarat Organs and Fine Music Festival

St. John’s Anglican Church, Creswick,

Saturday January 10 at 11 am

This recital is being given on the church’s Fincham and Hobday instrument by Rhys Boak, resident music genius in St. Michael’s Uniting Church, Collins Street. The organ was relocated from the Wesleyan (Uniting?) Church, Barkly St., Ballarat in 2016 and has a solid range of stops for its two manuals and pedal board. Boak is committed to five definite works in his hour-long program: the Overture to Handel’s Occasional Oratorio of 1745-6 without the original trumpets and drums; Bach’s towering Prelude and Fugue in A minor BWV 543 from the Weimar years 1708-13; Haydn’s Eight Pieces for Musical Clocks from anywhere between 1772 and 1793; Mozart’s Minuet in D – possibly K. 355/576b from possibly 1789/90; and contemporary Hungarian Zsolt Gardonyi‘s 1995 jazz-inflected Mozart Changes based on the final movement to K. 576. As well, pieces by J. K. F. Fischer, John Stanley, and Theodore Dubois are promised which fleshes out some odd corners very neatly. Tickets follow the opening concert’s lead – $10, $35, or $45, depending on your age and/or career stage.

BAAZ AVAZ – ON THE SILK ROAD

Ballarat Organs and Fine Music Festival

Creswick Town Hall

Saturday January 10 at 2 pm

So it’s off to Persia and a recital involving music, dance and story-telling during which, somewhere along the hour-long expedition, we’ll doubtless meet up with the cry of the falcon mentioned in the event’s title. Four participants present this amalgam: Vahideh Eisaei contributing vocal work as well as playing the qanun or large zither; Dong Ma on erhu or Chinese two-stringed fiddle which may have links to the (more topical for this recital) rehab; Elnaz Sheshgelani covering the stories and the dance components; and Yang Ying on pipa or Chinese lute which came to that country along the Silk Road. This is one of those occasions where you enter a world unfamiliar to most of us; my experience of Persian music has been confined to an Adelaide Festival recital many years ago from an ensemble playing court music – or so it was claimed. That’s the sort of cultural ignorance that a presentation like this seeks to remedy; it’s not all Omar Khayyam and Hafez or the AliQapu restaurant here in Kew. If you’re a student, you can get in for $10 plus a piffling booking fee of 75 cents; concession card holders ($35) and adults ($45) have to go on waiting lists because their allocations are sold out.

VERSAILLES IN LOVE

Ballarat Organs and Fine Music Festival

St. Paul’s Anglican Church, Bakery Hill

Saturday January 10 at 6 pm

Quite a lot of promises made for this non-specific 60-minute program which features a quintet of musicians, some of whom I know. Soprano Myriam Arbouz, baroque violinists David Rabinovici and Tim Willis, baroque triple harpist Hannah Lane, and theorboist Nicholas Pollock presumably combine and re-congregate in small groups to take us through works by Lully, his father-in-law Michel Lambert, and his student Marin Marais. Two specific forms are designated: the air de cour and chamber music – which is telling us nothing, except that the songs preclude the three composers named who all wrote airs of a different colour. As for the other, these musicians have a wealth of rich, magnificently mannered material from which to select; a pity they haven’t let us into their confidence about what we’d be paying for. Speaking of which, prices follow the usual pattern: $10 for students, $35 for concession holders, $45 for adults with a maximum booking fee of $1.63 and a minimum of 75 cents – almost seems pointless to charge it.

TELEMANN PARIS QUARTETS

Ballarat Organs and Fine Music Festival

Ballarat Performing Arts Centre, Soldiers Hill

Sunday January 11 at 2 pm

These works are being presented by the Coomoora Ensemble, apparently headed by baroque violin Lizzy Welsh (she writes on Instagram about ‘my delightful Coomoora Ensemble’, which strikes me as a pretty obvious statement of ownership. She’s accompanied on her sojourn into Telemann by Alison Catanach on baroque flute, Edwina Cordingley on baroque cello, and Ann Murphy playing harpsichord, as is her wont. It’s not clear if the ensemble can get through all twelve of the Paris quartets – six Quadri published in 1730, and six Nouveaux quatuors printed in 1738. In fact, I doubt if they could, given their recital’s 60 minutes time-span. I suspect that they’re attempting the latter, given that they refer to works composed during Telemann’s visit to the French capital in 1737-8. But then, all of them were written before he hit Paris, so they may be attempting a mixture. Whatever the case, this hour (possibly longer) will cost you $10 a student, $35 a concession holder (but not Seniors’ Cards, apparently), and $45 full adult, with a negligible booking fee ranging from $1.63 to 75 cents.

O FILII ET FILIAE – ORGAN SPLENDOUR OF THE (MOSTLY) FRENCH BAROQUE

Ballarat Organs and Fine Music Festival

St Paul’s Anglican Church, Bakery Hill

Sunday January 11 at 6 pm

Another solo organ recital to balance Rhys Boak’s one on Saturday January 10 in Creswick, this mixed collation lasting an hour is being presented by Donald Nicholson, showing us another side to his musical abilities after he has played harpsichord for the festival’s opening concert. Yet again, details are scant although he is sitting securely in a French gallery by performing works by Couperin, Louis Marchand, Jean-Francois Dandrieu and Nicolas de Grigny. For the first of these, I can find only two organ works, both mass settings; Marchand offers more, some of them formidable elements of the French repertoire; Dandrieu I know only through his Noels but he did write an Easter offertory, published in 1739, based on the plainchant that gives this event its title; de Grigny is celebrated for his only publication – a Premier livre d’orgue from 1699 which has a preponderance of church music in it. Just to offer a change of diet, Nicholson will also play some pieces by Buxtehude to offer a ‘dash of fiery North German contrast’ – just what those French formalists need. Ticket prices follow the usual $10, $35, $45 pattern (student, concession, adult) with a small booking fee too minute to outline, too inconsiderable to make any difference to anybody.

FOUNDATION OF FANTASIE

Ballarat Organs and Fine Music Festival

St. Paul’s Anglican Church, Clunes

Monday January 12 at 11 am

For this excursion to the book-driven town of Clunes, lutenist Rosemary Hodgson and organist Jack Stacey are attempting to draw some parallels between Renaissance architecture and the period’s music. Terrific, and good luck with that. Their 60-minute presentation centres on the works of Alonso Ferrabosco the younger who performed for Elizabeth I and Hodgson is playing all seven of the composer’s extant fantasias, leavening this core with side-steps to vocal intabulations, passamezzi and pavans. An intriguing venture, although the fantasias look to me as being more suited to a chest of viols than a lute, mainly because of some sustained notes that a soloist (apart from an organist) can’t manage. You’re invited to find similarities between the cleanness of form and structural balance of a building from this time in the clarity and formal integrity of the Elizabethan viol composer’s works. As I read things, Stacey is to provide a solo on the church’s organ at the start of the recital but I can’t find anything by Ferrabosco for that instrument; in this case, a Hamlin & Son rarity that sits in remarkably close relationship to the church’s acoustic properties, as I remember from over a decade ago – since which time (2018) the instrument has been restored extensively. The usual entry costs apply: $10 a student, $35 for concession holders, $45 an adult, all with small booking fees that probably won’t put patrons off.

REEDS & RESONANCE – MUSIC FROM THE GOLDEN AGE OF THE BASSOON

Ballarat Organs and Fine Music Festival

Clunes Town Hall

Monday January 12 at 2 pm

This hour-long entertainment brings back some of the opening concert’s contributors: Nicholas Pollock resumes his theorbo and adds a Baroque guitar, while the Unholy Rackett group is identified as Simon Rickard, Brock Imison and Jackie Newcomb, all manipulating curtals and their namesake instrument. Also involved is triple harpist Hannah Lane, returning after her Love in Versailles participation on January 10 and the festival’s director Laura Vaughan consorting with her gamba. And this is one program where you know exactly what is being presented: a Sonata for four trombones from the Op. 22 collection of 1655 by Biagio Marini; two pieces from the Canzone, fantasie e correnti of 1638 by Bartolome de Selva y Salaverde in the soprano and bass song Vestiva hi colli passaegiatto and a canzon for two tenors (trombones?); a set of variations on La Folia by Antonio Martin y Coll from Volume V of his 1706 Flores de musica; Giovanni Bertoli’s 1645 Sonata settima that one would assume was for the bassoon, which was his instrument; Kapsberger’s Tenore del Kapsberger from the 1604 Volume 1 of his Intavolatura di chitarone, plus the Bergamasca and Canario from the Intavolatura Volume 4 of 1640; from Il primo libro de balli of 1578, Giorgio Mainiero’s La lavandera/Caro ortolano, probably for a rackett; the 1609 setting of Es ist ein’ Ros’ entsprungen by Praetorius; two anonymous songs in Vos senora, a maltratada and the Portuguese Renaissance lyric/laugh Nao tragais borzeguis pretos, both played on curtals by the Racketts; Machado’s Dos estrellas le siguen which I have come across as a four-part chorale-type invention from the Cancionero de la Sablonara of 1624/5; finally, Daniel Speer’s first (only?) two Sonatas for two violas published in 1697 and hisSonata for three bassoons (C Major or F Major?) which I believe comes from the same year. Anyway, tickets follow the usual costings: students $10, concession $35, adults $45 plus a nonsensical booking fee of minute proportions, although still a nuisance to fork out.

DARKNESS AND DELIGHT – JERRY WONG

Ballarat Organs and Fine Music Festival

Ballarat Mechanics’ Institute, Sturt St.

Monday January 12 at 6 pm

A 60-minute recital from the Head of Keyboard at the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music is a singular surprise in this festival line-up. Jerry Wong hasn’t detailed what he is going to present, like so many contributors to this enterprise, but he opens a pretty wide door by introducing certain names as contributing agents. There’s Bach, Beethoven, Liszt – and Miriam Hyde, as a kind of satisfaction for our nationalistic yearnings. But the evening’s title gives an immense scope, as all of these composers have dealt with both the highs and lows of human experience. Still, it’s always worth your while listening to an artist of Wong’s calibre and, if the names strike you as promising, then you can get in for the usual fee: adults $45, concession holders $35, students $10, and the small booking fee that nevertheless nags like an itch in the middle of your spine.

MEDITERRANEAN – ELISABETTA GHEBBIONI

Ballarat Organs and Fine Music Festival

Loreto College Chapel

Tuesday January 13 at 11 am

Starting the festival’s final day comes Italian harpist Elisabetta Ghebbioni, a veteran performer at this festival and a professor at the Benedetto Marcello Conservatory in Venice. As is characteristic of so many performers in these Ballarat days, her program is unknown, even if her publicity refers to a few names: Albeniz, Saint-Saens, Einaudi ‘and others’. The first of these will probably involve an arrangement because I can’t find any harp works by Albeniz. Saint-Saens has a solo Fantaisie from 1893 and a 1918 Morceau de concert but nothing else relevant or practicable (apart from more arrangements). As for Einaudi, I assume this artist will be playing pieces from his album Stanze of 1992, although he has endorsed arrangements of some piano works for the harp. By the way, Einaudi is visiting Melbourne next month, playing at the Myer Bowl. Still, what information there is on this recital seems – even in this context – a bit vague, while Ghebbioni’s screed in the festival bumf is too brief to be of much use to anyone. Tickets for this event will be the same as all the others at the centre of this festival: $10 a student, $35 a concession holder, $45 full price, with the nugatory booking fee attached, increasing slightly as your price goes up. But, doing dutiful research, I couldn’t get on to the booking site – Error 404 made its entry for no apparent reason.

SUITES & SONGS

Ballarat Organs and Fine Music Festival

St. Paul’s Anglican Church, Bakery Hill

Tuesday January 13 at 2 pm

Cellist Josephine Vains is at the centre of this recital, although Jack Stacey is again going to preface proceedings with a solo on the church’s J. W. Walker organ, and why not? He’s this church’s organist. You’d have to assume that we’re going to hear at least part of a Bach cello suite; it’s also possible that we’ll hear all or part of one of the three Britten suites written for Rostropovich. Also mentioned in the publicity material is Gabrieli, whose cello works escape me; perhaps Stacey will kick in with some support here for – what? Then another one of the festival’s few dives into the vernacular with Ross Edwards; possibly Prelude & Laughing rock from 2003, or perhaps Monos I from 1970. As well, we’re to hear some Casals, who wrote a fair few works for cello, as you’d expect, but they all involve piano accompaniment; the Song of the Birds from 1941 might enjoy a sentimental visit. It’s all up in the air but tickets run through the familiar format: students pay $10, concession holders $35, and full adult tickets cost $45, all with a handling fee, which I assume only applies if you book on line.

FESTIVAL CLOSING CONCERT – SONGS OF LIGHT & DEVOTION

Ballarat Organs and Fine Music Festival

St. Patrick’s Cathedral

Tuesday January 13 at 6 pm

The subtitle to this final program is Life, Death & the Passion of 17th Century Italian Music; you can’t expect more in a concert than enjoying the two great existential fag-ends and, when you add in the Italian Baroque – be still, my beating heart. As usual, nothing specific is set down, nothing as vulgar as a set program, but we have some insinuations. For instance, we will definitely hear some late sacred music by Monteverdi; pieces from the 1641 Selva morale e spirituale, you’d reckon, or some scraps out of the Messa et salmi of 1650. As well, we can expect one (or more?) of the sacred oratorios by Luigi Rossi, with perhaps some extracts from the famous one for Holy Week whose provenance is even now questionable. Also, there will be a psalm setting or two from Giovanni Rigatti; there’s plenty to choose from as he published them across his brief career in 1640, 1643, 1646 and in the year of his death: 1648. Another name is Domenico Mazzocchi, famous for his motets so there should be a couple sung here, like the Videte et gustate published in 1664. Stephen Grant will be directing (as well as singing bass), principally his e21 Consort, but also Stephanie Eldridge and Lizzy Welch on baroque violins, Linda Kent at her harpsichord, John Weretka seated at (probably) a chamber organ, Hannah Lane bringing her triple harp into play for the third time this festival, and overall director of everything during these past days, Laura Vaughan plays both her gamba and a lirone. Tickets are currently unavailable on the usually reliable Humanitix website – not the best of omens. But I’d anticipate that they mirror those for the opening night and everything else – $10 for students, $35 for concession holders, $45 for adults with the by-now traditional small booking fee that seems to be necessarily attached to any event for which you either book online or pay by credit card.

Exemplary partnership in fluent performances

cliveoconnell

TRUE ROMANTICS

Philip Arkinstall and Kristian Chong

Move Records MCD 668

Well, you can’t argue with this CD’s descriptor. Clara Schumann and Brahms were solidly Romantic, their early lives focused around the lady’s husband, who was one of the great 19th century creators of that school alongside Chopin, Mendelssohn and Berlioz. In these latter days, Amazonian efforts have gone into foregrounding female composers, from Hildegard through Barbara Strozzi to Amy Beach and a multitude of contemporary Australians ( especially on ABC Classic radio). Schumann has enjoyed a revival of interest for decades longer than most of these writers, yet her appearance on programs must still be called – in all charity – uncommon.

The performers of one work by Schumann and two sonatas by Brahms on this disc for Move Records are Philip Arkinstall, associate principal clarinet with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra for the last 16 years, and Kristian Chong who is an associate lecturer in piano at the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music to anchor his active life as a performer.

On this CD, these performers give us Schumann’s Three Romances of 1853, originally written for violin and piano, here enjoying a transcription by Roger Young, Arkinstall’s colleague in the MSO where he has been a violinist for 26 years. The Brahms Clarinet Sonata in F minor and his Clarinet Sonata in E flat comprise the composer’s Op. 120 and date from 1894; these are the last chamber compositions he produced before his death and they make a magniloquent pair of gifts to an until-then almost non-existent repertoire, apart from a small quiver-full of concertos.

Clara Schumann’s Romances recall her husband’s compositional aesthetic in pretty much every aspect, apparent from the first Andante molto with its ambiguity of rhythm that doesn’t become quite clear until about bar 11, not to mention its floating harmonic underpinning, an adventurous chromaticism seen in the central segment from bar 24 to bar 32, and a steadiness of emotional output that you find in the male writer at his most impressive (the lieder, the chamber works with piano).

Moving to the second romance, complete with a German direction (Mit zartem Vortrage) that might have come from the composer’s nationalistic husband, we find a more orthodox harmonic complex, its ternary form running G minor, G Major, G minor with a quietly assertive main melody that recalls some of the more sparsely textured Songs Without Words. Arkinstall observes an appropriate dynamic restraint throughout this miniature’s length while Chong shows once again a discretion that falls short of self-effacement, always contributing to the partnership as you can hear in the musicians’ sensible and sensitive account of the final twelve bars, the clarinettist even giving us the violin’s final quadruple stop.

Again with the third romance, Robert Schumann’s linguistic choice enjoys pride of place with the direction Leidenschaftlich schnell, the musicians’ collaboration as ardent as you could want, given the benign, self-assured content in another ternary shape with the composer happy to maintain her B flat Major territory in the outer segments. From the start, Arkinstall’s main lyric is supported by fluid triplets from Chong that change only for regular semiquavers in the initial 21 bars where the main material recurs. The pianist once more exercises an assertive discretion throughout, both players investing the work with a tidal ebb and flow in dynamics while the metre stays constant, Arkinstall making gentle work of the three-note pizzicato chords between bars 50 and 57.

After these novelties come two familiarities in the Brahms sonatas. The No. 1 in F minor is more familiar to most of us than its partner in E flat Major; why this is, I have no idea except that performers might find the first more satisfying to play or present, or it might be that audiences are more receptive to its flamboyant style of address. Whatever the reason, Arkinstall and Chong open it up to a remarkably clean airing, right from the opening Allegro appassionato which gives us an object lesson in nuanced shading from the clarinettist and an admirable, mud-free outline of the keyboard part where every bass note registers and Chong’s surges into action ring out clearly, especially when the going gets piano concerto-mode tough (as at the end of the development, bars 116 to 132).

Profitably for us all, the interpretation is invested with dynamic tension, but the piano conclusion starting at bar 225 gives an excellent instance of shared responsiveness where the instruments dovetail with care to make the composer’s last reminiscence of his opening phrase somehow inevitable and poignant. Which makes a fine transition to the restrained and compact Andante that takes us on a simple ternary journey with a slightly surprising chain of modulations before re-settling onto its A flat Major homestead. No surprises here from either performer as they handle this brief segment with a deft mobile lassitude.

Coming out of the A flat Major warmth of the slow movement, we strike it lucky again in the ‘scherzo‘ movement (well, A flat with lots of E flat Major getting in the way). This is an appealing landler that varies its rhythmic predictability in the trio where the piano has an almost continuously syncopated right hand melody line (apart from 12 bars in the second part). You can find some moments of quiet humour like the clarinet’s laconic quiet interpolations when the piano has the main tune in bars 9 to 16, and the woodwind’s suggestions of yodelling in bars 35 to 38. To their distinct credit, these performers find and maintain the movement’s inner bounce and bucolic grace.

Finally, we enter the realms of the Academic Festival Overture with Chong’s expounding of the central theme to this F Major rondo with that combination of strength and lightness that typifies this reading. Despite its arresting opening, the theme moves into staccato chattering in its second and third quarters, but the distinction of this performance is the pleasure you experience on each recurrence. Not to forget the St. Anthony Chorale reminiscences when we move into buoyant crotchet triplets at bar 42 and later at bar 142. Once again, these musicians show a combined delicacy of insight into the score’s energetic bravura and its simple, happy brio.

I suppose what counts against the E flat Sonata from the beginning is the sentimental nature of the opening friendly Allegro‘s first subject. Further, Brahms is not slow in presenting us with several splendid melodies – or fragments of them – while ringing some vivid dynamic changes, like the sudden burst of language from the Piano Concerto No. 2 across bars 15 to 18; this continues in sporadic eruptions like bar 39, bars 60 to 64, and later in the recapitulation. But then, the clarinet writing is so mellifluous and persuasive in its wide arcs that the wonder is these players combine with such great empathy to give us a masterful composite, graced with yet another bout of splendid warmth in the concluding twelve Tranquillo bars.

It’s about now that you appreciate the compression at work in these two works; much of the first and all of the second operate without repeats so that you are in a constant state of discovering fresh country. Even second hearings of what seems like the same matter can be deceptive by means of altered accompaniment or original transpositions and modulations. This may go some way to explaining the sense that this sonata’s second movement is brief although it follows the classic scherzo pattern. Further, Brahms breaks into his four-bar phrase patterns with some arresting interruptions.

The piano writing here suggests parts of the rhapsodies, but the intertwining of both sound sources is admirably supple, both in the ‘dying fall’ passages like bars 48 to 64 and the two noble shared chorales of the central Sostenuto trio. I’ve heard other readings where the atmosphere is darker and angst-driven, but I think Arkinstall and Chong have the right of it with their cool outlining of the controlled agitation that underpins these pages.

And then you come to the last movement which starts Andante on a set of variations that stands with the best of the composer’s more emotionally untrammelled, benign creations. Starting with an ordinary skipping tune, a lyric with a lilt, Brahms brings about a set of cadences that culminate in a satisfying plagal in bar 14. From the opening statement, we move into off-the-beat commentary from the piano, triplets alternating between the players, a demi-semiquaver duel, a variant in which the piano is continuously syncopated while the clarinet outlines a version of the theme sotto voce for the most part, then an E flat minor elegant furiant before an inconclusive Piu tranquillo, the quick allegro returning for a final burst of high spirits with some chortle-rich piano writing from bar 134 almost to the end with cross-rhythms galore against a cooperative if comparatively strait-laced clarinet.

All this comes off very well indeed without any signs of faltering in attack or pace. But that could be said about the whole disc; throughout the three scores, Arkinstall and Chong demonstrate how a chamber music partnership should function, with every phrase mirrored or duplicated, with the dynamic ebb and flow organized carefully with each other, and with every slight rallentando – no, even the big ones – carefully graduated so that entries are pointedly precise. It all speaks for the high worth of this exemplary, polished disc.

Sydney visitors’ laudable initiative

cliveoconnell

RARE SUGAR

Omega Ensemble

Elisabeth Murdoch Hall, Melbourne Recital Centre

Tuesday December 2, 2025

David Rowden

Saying goodbye to its small Melbourne audience for this year. the Omega Ensemble gave its hope-to-see-you-later recital in the Recital Centre’s larger space; something of a population error as we could all have fitted pretty comfortably into the Primrose Potter Salon downstairs. True, the dynamics could have been overpowering to the point of painful in the smaller space but that’s more a case of having to cut cloth to suit width as opposed to throwing cash into an undertaking that might show promise but has a long way to go before attracting an audience along the lines of the thousand who can fill .the Elisabeth Murdoch Hall.

Much of the performance attention fell on the Omegas’ artistic director, David Rowden, who played in two of the three works presented by the Sydney-based group. He took the clarinet part in Bartok’s Contrasts of 1938, that unusual trio asking for the usual components of a violin (Veronique Serret) and a piano (Vatche Jambazian), alongside the cello-replacing woodwind line. All players took a sedate approach to the opening Verbunkos: a restrained Moderato indeed with the pulse closer to crotchet=94 than to 100. As well, both Serret and Jambazian proved aggressive after the politenesses were out of the way, so that the forte outbreak at bar 23 proved striking.

Still, to his credit, Jambazian refrained from overpowering his colleagues in the sequence of glissandi that emerge between bars 45 and 54. This movement ends with a taxing clarinet cadenza that Rowden handled with clarity and found a restraint of delivery in what amounts to an exuberant series of irregular arpeggios and scales.

In the following Piheno, we came across several instances when the performers’ congruence was off; not by much, but just enough to disturb the fluency of an otherwise eloquent reading. This wasn’t evident in the outer hymn-like segments but came up in the movement’s changes of pace, like the second Movendo and the overlapping of the Tranquillo bars. Nonetheless, I was impressed by the sustained tension across a set of pages that can be marred by preciousness on one hand and over-exertion in bar 25’s Piu mosso and the crisis at bars 33 to 34 for clarinet and violin in duet.

Bartok’s requirement in the concluding Sebes for a change of clarinets and violins cane be messy and Serret needed more than the allowed nearly-five bars to make the switch but the composer set up a repetition of bar 34 until the player is ready to kick off again. When Rowden came to change his instrument at bar 132 (B flat for A, they tell me), the movement just stopped before Jambazian initiated the ‘Bulgarian’ Piu mosso. Admittedly, there’s a caesura in the score but it seemed to last a fair while, all the more noticeable in this rapid movement.

Serret’s version of the violin cadenza proved to be heavy-handed, even those sections with left-hand pizzicato; the entry of everyone back into the fray at bar 214 also gave us another instance of the musicians – clarinet and violin, I suspect – not coming in quite together. To my mind, the exhibition here by Jambazian was remarkable in its variation of attack and responsiveness to the multiple demands that pianist Bartok made on his keyboard performer. Yes, for most of its length, the Sebes is in 2/4, apart from that central 13/8 interlude, but the participating pianist is stretched by alternately setting the running semiquaver pattern and punctuating the other lines in a vital, invigorating series of sustained flurries. I’m afraid that much of my attention centred on Jambazian and his dextrous handling of this rapid-fire exhibition of virtuosity.

Ella Macens wrote her Through the Mist this year for the Omega organization and we were hearing its third performance on this occasion. Serret and Jambazian were involved, as were second violin Emma McGrath, viola Neil Thompson, cello Paul Stender, and double bass Harry Young. This new product struck me as operating, for the most part, in a single tonality – all the white notes – with a modulation coming up in what I think might have been the third movement: Piu mosso, con moto. But the composer’s suggestive atmospherics made this a bland soundscape, compared to which Debussy’s Brouillards is a sonorous typhoon.

At the beginning, the string quintet generated long sustained notes, alleviated by Jambazian’s piano with some cadenza-like interleaving. This continued for a fair while, taking us into the world of some of Macens’ Scandinavian seniors and peers where placidity and repetition become the chief factors in a composer’s creative panoply. We were lulled into this comfortable ambience, so much so that I had no idea when the movement’s changed from Slow, Spacious, Grand to L’istesso tempo although the pianist’s role did become more prominent, and a folk-like tune emerged in the top strings with cello and pizzicato bass eventually joining in the muted merriment.

As for the move to a quicker pace for the third section, that also failed to have any impact on these ears. Then again, I was looking for old-fashioned markers, indicators of sudden alterations as in a suite or symphony whereas I think Macens was concerned with a continuous journey – a slow-moving progress for which the mist provides an all-embracing shield. That’s fine, except that it was hard to find any suggestion of what we are being protected against. If you were expecting more than a pretty monochromatic universe, you would have been disappointed.

This composer occupies an unusual position by straddling the seemingly static sound worlds of the post-Tavener mystics (which is doing them a temporal disservice, I know) and the simpler output of popular music where not much happens but nothing grates or gives offence. Through the Mist could be used to illustrate/support a quiet documentary yet its lack of thrust, of drive puts it in a category of its own. I kept on thinking of Debussy – not just Brouillards, but also Nuages where the return of those low wood-wind chords serves as an anchor, while Macen’s chords are ends in themselves.

Rowden returned for the night’s title work, referring to a concertino by Nigel Westlake for clarinet, piano and a string quartet of the same format that Macens employed, fortuitously enough. This piece in one movement is almost 20 years old and has been adopted by several local artists since 2007; I’ve heard it played by Lloyd Van’t Hoff and way back from Catherine McCorkill so, although it might not be a regular presence on your annual concert scene, it does enjoy more occasional resuscitation than most other contemporary Australian scores. Written as a 90th birthday present for a UNSW chemistry professor who at one stage specialized in rare sugars, the work served as yet another instance of the composer’s skill at engaging us, even if any attempt to find musical correlations with the molecular breakdown of sugar in any form was doomed before it began.

Right from the start, we entered a world of various and variable textures, the ensemble’s output rich and mobile. This was particularly obvious in the clarinet writing, but then you’d expect that from Westlake who was (is?) a notable performer on that instrument and who enmeshed his soloist in the accompanying forces, with some radiant flourishes for the strings en masse. Further, the pleasures kept coming, like a deft duet between Rowden and Verett, and a page or two of fine pointillism between the high strings and piano.

Moving from his initial Scherzo into a central Tranquillo, Westlake contrived a finely-spun duet from Rowden and Jambazian that brought to mind parts of Westlake’s film music (not so much the heavy Romanticism but a trademark simple lucidity) and inevitably brought to mind Messiaen’s slow Louanges with the clarinet replacing the original cello and violin. A general address from all brought us to the short cadenza for clarinet, then the concluding scherzo with a plethora of cross-rhythms and syncopation as well as more suggestions, this time of Copland and his Rodeo jauntiness.

It’s a significant gift, bringing Australian music to the fore, and the Omega administration and players are very welcome for their endeavours in that regard. Of course, it’s a fraught exercise, given the current economic hardships that many of us are undergoing: where is your audience coming from in these piping times of genteel poverty? Like many of our Melbourne-and-environs organizations, the ensemble will probably have to cut corners. But their contribution to the country’s music-making is exceptionally able and worthwhile; I, for one, hope to see them here – and flourishing – in 2026.