NIGHT AND NOW 2021 CONCERT SEASON 1 Support Australian musical excellence for less than the cost of your daily coffee With a convenient monthly donation starting at $25/month, you will help us expand our National Touring Program, commission new works from important musical voices and connect with the next generation of concert audiences. For more information visit omegaensemble.com.au/donate 20 Feb - 26 Mar 2021 NIGHT AND NOW Concertos, Quintets and World Premieres Gordon Kerry Newcastle Clarinet Quintet Sat 20 Feb 2021 Elena Kats-Chernin 7:00PM Newcastle City Hall Flute Quintet, 'Night and Now' Presented as part of * World Premiere New Annual Festival Frédéric Chopin Penrith Piano Concerto No. 1 in E minor, Op. 11 Fri 26 Feb 2021 (Arrangement for Piano Quintet) 7:30PM Joan Sutherland This performance will last approximately Performing Arts Centre 90 minutes without interval Sydney Sat 27 Feb 2021 2:30PM & 6:30PM Utzon Room, Sydney Opera House Melbourne Fri 26 Mar 2021 2:30PM & 7:00PM Primrose Potter Salon, Acknowledgment of Country Melbourne Recital Centre Omega Ensemble acknowledges the traditional custodians of the many lands on which we perform and work. We pay respect to the Elders both past and present, and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. Details correct at time of printing. All performance times are approximate. Omega Ensemble reserves the right to alter scheduled artists and programs as necessary. Cover Photo: Keith Saunders 3 WELCOME Welcome to our 2021 Concert Season. Frédéric Chopin once wrote: "Sometimes I can only groan, suffer, and pour out my despair at the piano!" Over 385 days since our last public performance, the music in this program is not only a celebration of our triumphant return to the concert stage, but also a pouring out of our own musical hearts. It's true that the past year has been the most challenging period in our Ensemble's history, and we can't overexpress how grateful we are to be back on stage performing for you (a living, breathing audience!) after so long. It is equally special to mark our return to the concert hall with music by two of Australia's most celebrated composers, Gordon Kerry and Elena Kats-Chernin. It is an honour to add these important new works and musical voices to our Ensemble's ever-growing commissioning profile. I truly hope this performance is as fulfilling a musical experience for you as it will be for us. We thank you for your continued support and I can't wait to share more news of our 2021 Season with you very soon. David Rowden Artistic Director & Founder 4 MUSIC NOTES Gordon Kerry (1961— ) Clarinet Quintet Composed in 2019. Commissioned by Omega Ensemble with the generous support of Kim Williams AM. Digital world premiere at Sydney Opera House on 12 September 2020 followed by the first public performance at Nanda\Hobbs Gallery, Sydney on 18 October 2020. I. Grave – II. Andantino con moto – meno mosso Gordon Kerry III. Allegro – IV. Sostenuto – moderato – V. Grave Gordon Kerry lives on a hill in north-eastern Victoria, where he composes and writes about music. The 2021 season sees several new works for ensemble, orchestra and choir. Of his Clarinet Quintet, the composer writes: One can only hope that to compose a clarinet quintet isn’t tempting fate, given that the greatest of them – Mozart’s and Brahms’ – are late, if not last works. Brahms had essentially decided to stop composing and set his affairs in order at around my current age, and only an unexpected experience of hearing Richard Mühlfeld’s clarinet-playing spurred him to write those late masterpieces for the instrument. It is always a pleasure to write for specific performers, and I hope this work adequately celebrates David Rowden’s lyricism and technical agility, as well as the talents of those fine musicians who have formed Omega Ensemble. In addition, I am grateful for the support of Kim Williams – himself both clarinettist and composer, and an exemplary patron of the arts. 5 6 The piece is in five linked movements: the opening Grave poses a number of questions, before a kind of cadenza for clarinet set against spacious chords. The Andantino that alternates between fast-moving shimmer and sparser counterpoint, and moves via a second cadenza to the Allegro. This contrasts passages of florid writing with broader melodic sections, before raucous unmusical sounds lead to the Sostenuto section. The music here is much gentler at first, becoming more agitated and collapsing in a ruck of string sounds. The finale section is marked Grave and is often very slow, picking up some threads from the opening, but adding layers of ever more elaborate texture. Elena Kats-Chernin (1957— ) Flute Quintet, 'Night and Now' Based on Flute Concerto, premiered by Sally Walker and Darwin Symphony Orchestra in 2015. Adapted for flute quintet by Elena Kats- Chernin and Elizabeth Jigalin, and commissioned by Omega Ensemble with the generous support of the Stanley Family. I. Solemn – piu mosso – tranquillo II. Allegro moderato e molto ritmico – slower, expansive III. Cadenza – Rondo Within Elena Kats-Chernin’s prodigious output are several recurring preoccupations. There is her interest in fairy tale and myth: one of her finest orchestral works is entitled, simply, Mythic and specific tales inform various other works including her celebrated ballet, Wild Swans and its satellite pieces, inspired by Hans Christian Andersen’s story. At the same time, Kats-Chernin’s music often recalls and evokes Russia; she was born in Tashkent and, as she says, until she was 17 years old, the old Soviet Union ‘was everything that I knew’. These two preoccupations came together in Night and Now, in its first iteration as a flute concerto written for flautist Sally Walker in 2015, and now adapted for flute quintet for Walker and Omega Ensemble. The first of its three movements, as Kats-Chernin notes: ... is based on two imagined Russian fairy tales; one Opposite Page: Elena Kats-Chernin. Photo: Bruria Hammer 7 Above (L-R): Composer Elena taking place deep in the woods – always a place of Kats-Chernin and flautist Sally Walker. Photo: Steven foreboding and unease (for this writer), but also promise Godbee and adventure and transformation. The other is in a silvery castle, impressively elaborate and bejewelled. A place of immersive succour and plenty. Two very different ‘nights’. The woods are rendered in simple textures, as the strings provide sustained harmonic support for the flutes often folk-like phrases. The castle, perhaps, is evoked by more active music, with ornate lines for the flute and emphatic rhythms that final reach a state of tranquillity. By way of complete contrast, the Russia that haunts the second movement is more recent and immediate one, as Kats-Chernin explains: One of my overriding memories of childhood in Russia is of lining up for hours and hours for one loaf of bread or piece of cheese, and the perseverance and sometimes ultimate disappointment that had to be faced when food just ran out. This was absolutely distinct from the wonder and open-mouthed joy my family would feel when we were able 8 to get (greatly prized) oranges or strawberries. What a joy that was! Both of these extremes, joy and disappointment, are embedded in this movement. So, the movement consists of two highly contrasting musical manners: the first is a frenetic A minor Allegro, with an angular theme given out first by the flute and elaborated in insistent counterpoint by the whole ensemble; ‘joy’ is embodied in what Kats-Chernin described as ‘a more romantic, starry-eyed melody in a completely different key (D flat major)’ marked ‘slower, expansive’. The final movement begins with a cadenza, in which the flute develops material distantly related to the rising arpeggios and falling scales of the first movement, and the strongly profiled rhythmic motifs of the second. Its final trills imperceptibly become obsessive triplets, leading to the main body of the movement, a tarantella in C minor. This ever more energetic dance – associated with the southern Italian city of Taranto – has attracted its own myth, which Kats-Chernin found attractive: I like the story of the Tarantella evolving from the agitated dance of the victim of a tarantula bite. The bitten would attempt to draw out the spider poison through ever more vigorous and indefatigable movements, gestures and signs. Most Tarantellas are in 6/8 but mine is in 12/8. Perhaps there were two spiders? Frédéric Chopin (1810–1849) Piano Concerto No.1 in E minor, Op.11 (for Piano Quintet) Composed in 1830. I. Allegro maestoso II. Romanze: Larghetto III. Rondo: Vivace Frédéric Chopin, detail of a photo by L.A. Bisson, 1849, Chopin knew from very early in adult life that the career of piano taken in the home of his virtuoso was not for him. According to his friend, colleague and rival Parisian publisher. Franz Liszt, Chopin was ‘repelled by the furious and frenzied face of Romanticism’. Where Liszt’s career traces a magnificent arc from prodigy through virtuoso to distinguished composer of large-scale works, Chopin’s seems a story of withdrawal from the concert 9 "It should be like dreaming in beautiful springtime – by moonlight." platform and even from metropolitan society. But the cliché of him retreating into miniatures is inaccurate. Not only do the solo works in the genres that he made his own, such as the nocturne, ballade, polonaise or mazurka, often take on a substantial scale and an amazing intricacy, Chopin remained interested enough in ‘classical’ forms to complete his Third Sonata as late as 1844.