Month: February 2026

STARBURST

Omega Ensemble

Elisabeth Murdoch Hall, Melbourne Recital Centre

Wednesday February 18, 2026

David Rowden

Back for another year of Melbourne endeavours, the Omega Ensemble, a Sydney-based contemporary music group, opened its 2026 account with a 90-minute-long program that began with an American work and ended in an Australian composition. Neither of these spoke a convincingly modern language but both found favour with this audience which reacted positively after each. In the middle came two concertos: Gerald Finzi’s Concerto for Clarinet and Strings of 1949, which has clearly been on the musicians’ minds since the visit last year of Michael Collins, a noted exponent of this work, here fronted by Omega artistic director/founder David Rowden; and the 1933 Piano Concerto No. 1 for Piano, Trumpet and String Orchestra by Shostakovich which featured Omega stalwart Vatche Jambazian taking on the keyboard role while the Sydney Symphony Orchestra’s principal David Elton negotiated the brass line.

As a preliminary foray, a string nonet – which constituted the Ensemble for this evening – played the concert’s title work by Jessie Montgomery which has proved one of the composer’s more popular works, I’d suggest, because of its sunny, festive nature. Written in 2012, the composer specifies a minimum requirement of 3/3/3/2/1 for participant numbers; in this case, she got two cellos and a double bass, but had to be content with two each of the upper strings.

Listening to or watching recordings of this work gives you some insight into contemporary music playing in the US as compared to the UK and here. While the American orchestras approach this score with caution, a body like the Philharmonia gives it a vigour and elegance of execution that elevates the music above a kind of plodding insistence. Just so with the Omega group which gave a vital and involving execution of a work that is strong on ostinati and semiquaver runs while short on rhythmic or harmonic innovation.

Add a significant virtue in that the work lasts just long enough and the conductor-less performers made Starburst into an initial burst of energy which was carried on to the Finzi concerto. Just as well that Rowden pitched his dynamic to the accompaniment because the composer has most of his forces playing divisi at some point, particularly the cellos in the first Allegro and, with the best will in the world, one player per line is stretching your volume requirements a long way. This lack of depth also meant the movement’s big moments, like the peroration up to the clarinet’s entry at Number 1 in the Boosey & Hawkes score, the triple forte outburst seven bars before Number 5, those insistent Gs from everybody before the cadenza, and the last eight powerful maestoso bars, came over as light imitations of the real thing.

A similar difficulty infected the following Adagio which was impossible to linger over, senza rigore, because of a lack of full-body timbre. You couldn’t say that Rowden rushed through it but the ritardando and ritenuto moments, apart from that before the clarinet’s first entry ad lib., were hardly spacious enough for this eloquent, elongated lyric. Still, the combined forces rose to the occasion of the movement’s powerful highpoint at Number 5 where the main theme is given in an unexpectedly vehement voice. As well, you would be hard of heart not to be moved by the last pages of this section, Rowden’s progress to the last F finely balanced.

Finzi’s finale, a folk-tune reminiscent allegro, passed without making much impact, apart from its melodic fluency and the soloist’s flexibility of articulation. It strikes me as a stop-start series of pages where striding certainty peters out regularly for ‘busy’ work, interrupted by a hard-to-ignore flavour of the Introduction and Allegro in the strings’ ritornello before Number 8. At the end, you’ve have to say this was a worthy outing for the score but one deficient in gravity and variety of timbre, particularly as the string body is responsible for the carrying-forward of the score; more so than the soloist, I’d suggest.

For the Shostakovich, Jambazian played the keyboard with his back to us and without a lid on his instrument. What followed was inevitable: his sound flew up to the Murdoch Hall ceiling and the biting attack of the composer’s pianistic brilliance was dissipated. Mind you, with such small string forces, that had its compensations but it gave Elton’s trumpet an unusual prominence. As with the Finzi work, this one also suffered from insufficient strings; not in the soloists-absent (for a short while) stretches, like the Allegretto in Movement 1, but when piano and strings are operating imitation around Numbers 21 and 22 (also in a Boosey & Hawkes edition) – you could see the gestures but the output sounded faint.

Even with the muted piano, you could hear that Jambazian was in control of this score; quite obviously in the Lento with its outer casing of a mournful slow waltz holding some highly dramatic pages. Elton’s treatment of the solo starting at Number 34 in tandem with Jambazian generated an impressive elegiac moment or two, if muted in timbre and nature. But it’s a startlingly fraught segment in a concerto where the emphasis is emphatically on hectic jollity.

Again, the Moderato interlude gave Jambazian the opportunity to be heard clearly in the solo that opens these pages; welcome after previous showings, the whole not helped by some hefty employment of the sustaining pedal. Our string nonet gave a forceful account of the lament that breaks from them, mutes off, a bar after Number 45, bringing another tragic undercurrent to this chameleonic score.

Which reaches its apex in the breakneck finale and found both soloists in fine fettle. Jambazian’s solo contributions at the upper level of his instrument travelled well enough but the two solos sounded muddled, especially that starting in F minor at Number 76 which sounds like a Hungarian Dance gone wrong. It’s hard to misfire with the ongoing exhilaration that fills these pages and, while the strings were often completely subsumed by the pianist’s ferocity, they were at least able to make their points during the intervening commentaries – and supporting Elton who maintained a cogent and expressive line to the insistent final bars.

Last came a new concerto written for Rowden and Elton, commissioned by the Omega Ensemble: A Turning Sky. The composer is Lachlan Skipworth from Western Australia who has here favoured the traditional three-movement format; as well, he employs an unadventurous rhythmic foundation and a harmonic scheme that delights the ears of the groundlings but does little for any soul in search of a 21st century language.

You’re left in no doubt that Skipworth has a facility for well-constructed melody and he negotiated flamboyant roles for both his soloists, although Elton enjoyed more of the limelight, especially in concerted passages for both soloists. But I’m afraid this style of writing makes me impatient with its hankering for the past and by its following a path that has been travelled by too many other feet. I’ve said something similar before – frequently – but I don’t think you can ignore the entire progress of 20th century music and pretend that Stravinsky, Bartok, Schoenberg, Boulez, Stockhausen, Ligeti and a collection of American and British masters never existed.

We’ve come too far in the development of advanced vocabularies to turn back the clock and find inspiration in the tropes of popular music. There are excuses trotted out regularly for the pursuit of beauty through diatonicism once more, that we need old-fashioned tunes, that there is still much good music to be written in C Major. Well, for this last, perhaps there is but it will require a brilliant talent to accomplish it. In faith and hope and love, I’m still waiting.

RACHMANINOV’S RHAPSODY

Australian Chamber Orchestra

Hamer Hall, Arts Centre Melbourne

Sunday February 8, 2026

Dejan Lazic

Beginning the year with a rather short program, the Australian Chamber Orchestra visited Melbourne for its regular three appearances across as many days, of which this Sunday concert was the middle. Richard Tognetti led his regular 17 musicians (with the addition of percussionist Brian Nixon for the last number) through four works, one of them a new ACO commission enjoying its premiere: John Luther Adams‘ Horizon, which deals with two levels of perception and attempts to contrast the aspect we see from our current positions and that which is visible in open spaces like the desert or the sea.

What Adams gives us is a music-picture of these dual horizons. My problem is that I can’t tell the difference because, after one hearing, my sense is that the enclosed horizon is not depicted in the score which begins and ends in the same fashion: low didj-like drones from the bass strings, everybody else entering independently and making their own contributions to the sonorous melange of layers and twittering that comprise the work’s forward motion.

Several performers seem to stand alone to a certain extent throughout the performance, although two cellists and Maxime Bibeau‘s double-bass sat/stood together at the rear of the stage. In front of it all, Tognetti led a string quartet that could have been serving as a fulcrum body; if so, its function proved ultra-discreet because the members appeared to have the same freedom of delivery as everybody else in the ACO group. Which was probably not as great as I’m suggesting because the surges of crescendo and ebbings of decrescendo sounded well-organized across the score’s length.

You’d be hard pressed to find much more meat in Horizon than its shifting colours, the general texture changing all the time but not markedly. Lines become prominent for a moment, then recede into the over-arching texture – a kind of glimmering sheen, like visible heat-waves off the Outback’s sand surface or a mobile sea mist. You find yourself being wrapped in a sonorous cocoon, without events interfering to break you out of a pleasant torpor, least of all when players start dropping out of the mesh, replaying Haydn’s Farewell practice, if not actually leaving the stage.

And what dropped into this luminous silence? A phone going off, in the middle stalls on the right-hand side of the hall. Yet another inconsiderate swine demeaning a carefully prepared and staged moment. Only in Melbourne? Only in an elderly audience? If only. Still, the work had achieved its effect of depicting something close to an austere monumentality, putting Adams in a chain of US writers starting with the can-hardly-stand-still Ives, alongside Ruggles, Harris and Hovhaness – all, to some extent, concerned with nature, the environment, and unanswerable questions.

A complete change in pace arrived with Stravinsky’s Concerto in D ‘Basle’ of 1946; one of only two works I’m aware of for string orchestra by the composer (along with the ballet Apollo from 1927). Is this the first time the ACO has played this piece? The composer doesn’t loom large in the ensemble’s discography; in fact, I can’t find him at all, even if this type of whip-smart writing is ideally suited to these players.

That’s what they gave us: a reading that showed precise, clear-cut and impressive for its ensemble, requiring minimal direction from Tognetti in its opening slightly febrile Vivace which begins with a clash between Major and minor mediants and maintains its bitonal flavour all the way through its neo-classical byways. An admirable smoothness emerged in the following Arioso with its melodic leaps of 9ths and studied courtliness, while the concluding Rondo, in an unchanging 4/4, enjoyed a brilliant outlining delivered with the inimitable ACO panache.

This Stravinsky is a music that suits this ensemble and you’d have to look far and wide to find anything approaching the interpretation given here. It probably helps that much of the score is clever-clever, even the central movement studied in its sentiment. But the outer segments illustrated the poise and uniformity of control and output that the ACO produces on its best days, right down to the final, almost-tonal, nearly uniform D Major double- and triple-stop chord.

After a long interval, we moved on to the program’s second novelty, here enjoying its Australian premiere. Lithuanian writer Raminta Serksnyte wrote her De profundis in 1998 as a Bachelor’s degree graduation piece, scored for a string chamber orchestra, slightly larger than the ACO forces performing it this afternoon. Gidon Kremer made an extravagant claim for this work – ‘the calling card of Baltic music’ – but I found it only moderately interesting. Serksnyte begins with a wealth of activity in a rapid-fire light barrage of sounds, after which we come to what might be considered as a real plaint, justifying the title.

But the composer is not interested in the religious or liturgical suggestions of Psalm 130; rather, she sees it as a kind of hook on which to hang her tableau of a young soul migrating to experience, discovering life’s realism after youth’s exuberance. I suppose ‘Growing up’ doesn’t carry the same suggestion of elevated concepts as a Latin tag. In any case, the language changes back to the original Allegro/vivace flurries and chitterings, which reversion suggests a circularity of experience if not informed by subtle depths. Its impact speaks to a lively mind at work, but is this really the best of Baltic?

At last, we came to the program’s title work: the Russian pianist/composer’s brilliant 1934 set of excursions based on Paganini’s Caprice No. 24. For prime interpreter, we heard an ACO friend in Croatian-born Dejan Lazic who proved both sympathetic to the work’s spiky Romanticism as well as its richly flamboyant strain. All right, it’s a hard piece to get wrong in terms of technique: you either have it or you fumble, obviously so. But finding each point of equilibrium as it turns up – from the assertive opening, through the Dies irae mini-phantasmagoria, into the middle etudes-tableaux excursions that arrive finally at the soulful apex of that melting moment Andante cantabile in D flat, concluding with the spiky final set of six variants that eventually bring to mind every lush piano concerto finale, up to the finishing in-my-end-is-my-beginning quirk – that is demanding, a series of challenges that Lazic met with high success.

Indeed, in this 20-odd-minute journey, Lazic showed an impressive mastery of material, relishing each abrupt turn and wholly prepared to give free rein to the usually dour composer’s high spirits and what amounts to an emotional elation that permeates this most appealing of his piano-orchestra scores.

As was the case last year with the ACO’s attempt at Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, I missed the usual orchestral voices to a significant degree. Bernard Rofe‘s arrangement for piano, percussion and strings proved serviceable enough; as far as I could tell, Lazic wasn’t required to carry out anything but his own role and Nixon provided discreet additions to the texture (but did he have the complete set of the original score’s instruments, including glockenspiel and bass drum?). We missed a harp and ten each of both woodwind and brass.

Naturally, it’s beyond the ACO’s budget to carry 21 or 22 extra musicians around the country on an 11-concert operation, even if this particular tour covered only cities on the eastern side of the mainland. And I’m sure plenty of patrons would rather hear a truncated-in-forces version of this welcome work than not. But at certain moments, I missed individual and group timbres, the absence of which came as a cross between surprise and disappointment.

Even from the introduction, without the brass punctuation starting at Number 1 in the old Boosey & Hawkes score, you knew that you weren’t going to enjoy the usual environmental sparks; not to mention the clarinet/bassoon semiquaver slide three bars before Number 2. And on it went: the burbling clarinet gruppetti at bar 9 and bar 1 before Number 15 in Variation 6; the wind triplets that give a piquant edge to the Variation 9 texture at Number 26; the brass blazoning at Number 28 in the middle of Variation 10; the sprightly march that opens Variation 14 quasi Tromba in the woodwinds which reaches its bombastic best at Number 37 when all the brass enter wholeheartedly.

And still it continued: the plangent oboe at the start of Variation 17, followed by the first clarinet two bars after Number 45 – a brilliant complement; that energetic build-up of powerful bass layers under the piano’s full-blooded chords from Number 63 to two bars after Number 64; the vital pointillism in the woodwind starting Variation 24; and the hefty pesante of the brass hurtling out the Latin chant at Number 78.

You’d say that there’s no use crying over what couldn’t be done. I’d query why you’d bother doing something half-cocked. Even more so than with the Gershwin, you could sense the underdone nature of this effort, despite the soloist’s excellent demonstration of expertise and interpretative skill. Needless to say, Rachmaninov’s Rhapsody received enthusiastic applause from a pretty full house which clearly didn’t mind the thin orchestral fabric. De gustibus non est disputandum . . . except for mine, which are impeccable.