Concert Hall, Sydney Opera House
February 28, 2018

This was a colourful, often boisterous program, built around one of the most lyrical of 20th-century violin concertos. The title work, Elena Kats-Chernin’s Heaven is Closed, was written in 2000; indeed, Kats-Chernin began work on it on New Year’s Eve. It is a dynamic piece, scored for a large orchestra with considerable mastery in a part-exotic, part-filmic style that occasionally recalls the movie scores of John Williams. After a vigorous opening, the music falls into four-bar rhythmic patterns, jazzily syncopated, and eventually hammers out a tango rhythm: all influences that may be found in other works of the composer. They underpin sophisticated harmonic sleights of hand and a myriad of colourful orchestral textures. Just before the end comes a passage that suggests a series of knocks on a very large door that remains closed – heaven’s door, presumably – but there is not a whiff of religiosity about this piece. The orchestra clearly relished the full textures and big moments, which included the sonic equivalent of a panoramic camera pan-out at one point. Visiting Russian Dima Slobodeniouk conducted with clarity; the work’s unfamiliarity may have been responsible for a slight imprecision of...