Above: Dr Lou Bennett and Omega Ensemble musicicans in workshop. Photo credit : Laura Manariti. Featured image : Dr Lou Bennett, whose commissioned work, ‘nyernur, nyakur – to hear, to see’ was heard in world premiere at this concert. Photo credit: Romaine Moreton.
This touching concert programme amplifies the ability of bold, courageous, innovative composers to use music as a response to predicament and environment. From reflecting daily routine, through displacement, being a victim or continuing to create as a survivor, the music featured in Continuum is presented in parallel to suffering or restarts.
The penetrating performances by Omega Ensemble musicians and Dr Lou Bennett resonate well in the current national and global climate. The concert communicates using musical and extra-musical strength and colour.
This continuum of artistic strength and the shifting, variegated strength of an accomplished ensemble voice is excitingly explored in this event. The soundscapes created, no matter how horrifying the scene or how challenged the society it emerges from, remain in the hands of these performers an energetic expression as pure, joyous and integral to our environment as birdsong, spirituality and a meditative stillness.
This event begins with Arvo Pärt’s well known Spiegel im Spiegel in the composer’s arrangement for cello and piano rather than the original violin and piano version. The gentle, continuous triadic flux on keyboard with restrained, distanced bird-like or bell chime effects is perfectly introduced by Omega Ensemble pianist Vatche Jambazian. It is an indication of the precise and wide-ranging nuance to follow in this concert.
Above : Omega Ensemble pianist Vatche Jambazian. Photo credit : Keith Saunders.
The darker timbre of cello for this modern classic is here seamlessly evoked and maintained in beautiful slow-burn cycles of song by cellist Paul Stender. The gentle complexity of the subtle statements fill the Utzon Room landscape in measured line.
Pärt’s gentle voice and cleverly architectured style, despite harsh criticism by the Soviet regime which also plunged his original homeland into crisis is a fitting prelude to the sentiment of firm spirit continuing in the works which follow it.
Continuum as a concert programme pivots around the world premiere of a composition by Dr Lou Bennett AM. This is a joint commission by Omega Ensemble and Musica Viva. The composer’s approach to listening is explained in the concert’s excellent programme notes.
This involves respectfully listening to sound in the environment as a human, a non-intrusive part of the landscape, then reorganising it for Western chamber ensemble, which has thrilling results here.
The work’s completion and premiere follows workshops with Omega Ensemble by the Yorta Yorta Dja Dja Wurrung songwriter, director, curator actor and founding member of the popular nineties vocal group Tiddas.
This work, nyernur, nyakur – to hear, to see includes arrangement contributions by Iain Grandage. It begins with the playing of recorded birdsong from sunrise, which the composer moulds into individual strands for the ensemble to play after this introduction.
Above : Artistic Director and Founder of Omega Ensemble, clarinettist David Rowden. Photo credit: Keith Saunders.
Over the transformed, interlocking instrumental gestures gifted from nature, a recorded vocal line at this concert in language from Lou Bennett adds the human element to the other immense range of birdsong and instrumental colour.
The Omega musicians take good care here to maintain a delicate balance with the vocal element and evoke the sunrise as well as music of nature and Country.
This work’s multi-stranded, networked design demands intricate single lines and skilful overlap of the voice, recording and instrumental elements. Here an active stillness is virtuosically, respectfully achieved by the Omega superstars of piano (Vatche Jambazian), violin (Alexandra Osborne), clarinet (David Rowden) and cello (Paul Stender).
The exciting conclusion to this concert event is Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time. This classic born in a WW2 Stalag in 1941 was written for performance to entertain Nazi officers and Messiaen’s fellow prisoners. Using available instruments discovered in the prison, this somewhat rare chamber music line-up continues the concert’s focus of chiming bells, birdsong, meditatitve elements across changing ensemble textures and spirituality of the bigger picture.
Pianist Vatche Jambazian is a formidable anchor across the sprawling work as Messiaen’s unique and changeable rhythmic and colour language depicts in elaborate, simmering architecture the biblical Book of Revelation fragment.
Above : Cellist Paul Stender. Photo credit : Keith Saunders.
Omega Ensemble in this work moves in broad strokes as it conquers the difficulties of creating the composer’s signature drive, unique shapes, rhythmic language, demanding reiterations and textural shifts. Here the work speaks out in broad strokes and with clarity despite complexities as rigorous shifts in mood, volume and juxtaposition of musical motifs are managed.
For anyone who has never heard David Rowden’s solo clarinet work in the third movement, Abyss of the Birds, it is worth attending this concert just to witness his approach to extremes of volume, shape and depiction of emptiness and loss. String effects and undulations of colour and surfaces from glassy to spikiest, scariest on-edge protest are also scintillating.
This concert concept is a dynamic, moving package of sound and a thrilling celebration of ensemble music. Entertaining us is the directness of these ensemble musicians and composers so gifted in portraying feeling and features of landscapes various. We survive the continuum together.
This combination of powerful works cries out as being major-recording ready. However, its flow is also such a worthwhile live experience.
The Opera House concerts have finished, but two concerts remain at the Melbourne Recital Centre on April 28.