Month: December 2025

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.