Omega gets wired for sound for a contemporary walk on the wild side.

As well as being one of Australia’s finest performing chamber groups, Omega Ensemble also does important work to encourage young creatives through its CoLAB Composer Accelerator program. Among its mentors is “Brooklyn’s post-millennial Mozart”, Missy Mazzoli.

Her works often appear on Omega’s programs, and her solo for viola and electronics, Tooth and Nail, opened the program for their latest tour, featuring violist Neil Thompson, who is celebrating his 10th season with the ensemble.

The piece references jaw harp music in Uzbekistan, where the player plucks the instrument and changes the shape of their mouth to create overtones and melodies. Thompson’s amped viola played folk-influenced fragments against a pre-recorded track, which recreated the rhythmic pulse of the mouth harp, the tape adding harmonies and textures over a synthesiser bass line.

Thompson was joined by violinists Mark Ingwersen and Asmira Woodward Page, and cellist Paul Stender, for the next two works, both of which were Australian premieres and also featured amped instruments and taped soundtracks.

Scottish composer and performer Anna Meredith’s Tuggemo, dubbed “part string quartet, part rave”, takes its name from an obsolete term for a swarm of insects or a murmuration of birds. Swooping and sliding strings feature over a pounding techno soundtrack, with constant cross-rhythms and darting, synchronised changes of direction reminding this listener of some of Kronos Quartet’s world music recordings.

This led seamlessly into Daniel Wohl’s Interference Patterns –so seamlessly, in fact, that you could be forgiven for thinking at first that it was part of the Meredith piece.

Wohl, who was born in Paris but now lives in the US, says of his three-part, 10-minute work: “I was thinking about the constant stream of signals and interruptions that surrounds us … making it increasingly difficult to experience a moment as it is.”

It starts quietly – the strings playing a single note over a bass synth – before movement, colour and harmony slowly impose themselves. This calm is interrupted in the middle section, where string passages surge over a juddering bass, the volume increasing and the high strings slurring and sliding in harmony, before order is restored and the work ends on a downward-gliding string chorale.

The other two works on the program were acoustic, and US composer Pierre Jalbert’s three-movement work Howl, inspired by Allen Ginsberg’s seminal poem from the mid-1950s, featured some superb virtuosic soloing by Omega’s Artistic Director, David Rowden, on clarinet and bass clarinet, vying with a string quartet led by violinist Ingwersen.

Just as Ginsberg’s massive, single-sentence verse oscillates between “narrative shrieks” and “a litany of praise”, in one critic’s assessment, Jalbert’s work contains long lines breaking out into acrobatic runs, with Rowden working at the very top of the range of both instruments.

The middle movement is titled Litany and is lushly beautiful.

Danny Elfman is best known for his soundtracks for Tim Burton’s dark films, including Edward Scissorhands and Batman, but he has also gained recognition for his concert hall pieces. In his barnstorming Piano Quartet, written in 2017 for musicians from the Berlin Philharmonic, we can often feel the presence of one of his composing idols, Dmitri Shostakovich.

This performance highlighted some stunning pianism from Vatche Jambazian, the last movement, Die Wolfsjungen, having that same helter-skelter, motoric drive as the finale of the Soviet composer’s First Piano Concerto.

https://www.omegaensemble.com.au/howl