Celebrated composer Paul Stanhope lives near the Parramatta River in an area where the city comes together with nature and the wildlife that thrives in the parks and mangroves.

The Romans had a name for this kind of place – “paludarium”, a sanctuary where the two environments meet and overlap. So when Sydney’s Omega Ensemble commissioned a piece for clarinet and strings, Stanhope looked to his local birdcalls, thrumming cicadas and croaking frogs as raw material for his 20-minute three-movement piece premiered at the ensemble’s Inner Landscapes tour.

The work is part of Omega’s Living Music project and created with the support of Penrith Performing & Visual Arts, Ian Plater and Gaston Nguyen in Memory of the late Limelight publisher, Robert Veel.

Stanhope worked closely with Omega’s Artistic Director David Rowden who, introducing Paludarium Dreams with Stanhope, told the audience that in 30 years of playing the clarinet this was the first time he had been asked to impersonate a frog.

Omega Ensemble. Photo supplied

Accompanied by Vatche Jambazian’s piano and 11 string players, led by TSO Concertmaster Emma McGrath, Rowden gave a bravura display of virtuosity summoning a bird’s eye view as the clarinet soars and swoops over the city below in the opening In Flight movement. Skipping rhythms, shrill harmonics and trills and plucked strings anchor some challenging high register runs.

The middle movement, Nocturne, is a little night music as Mozart or even Bartók would never have imagined, with Rowden, Jambazian and scraping strings evoking frogs calling out to each over the rustling of insects and small creatures.

The final part, The Carollers, opens with a cadenza of birdcalls from magpies, currawongs and butcher birds that Stanhope heard in a park and transcribed. As the other instruments enter, jazzy rhythms come to the fore, and with sliding strings and wailing bluesy clarinet figures the piece builds to the joyous clamour of a Sydney sunset.

The other substantial work on the program was Gustav Mahler’s chamber orchestra arrangement of Franz Schubert’s Death and the Maiden String Quartet. Superbly led by McGrath, this was a tight performance which gave a nuanced insight into the later composer’s take on the original.

The concert opened with John Corigliano’s melancholic Soliloquy for clarinet and string quartet, written in 1977 to commemorate his father John Paul who was Concertmaster of the New York Philharmonic for 23 years. McGrath’s ethereal violin and Rowden’s desolate finely shaped phrasing build in intensity then die away again.

Fellow New Yorker Jessie Montgomery is no stranger to Omega’s audiences – several of her captivating and energetic works have been featured over the years. Rounds was written in 2022, inspired both by TS Eliot’s epic poem Four Quartets and by the composer’s fascination with fractals – geometric patterns in nature, think the structure of snowflakes – and our interconnectedness with other organisms.

“Like Eliot … beginning to understand this interconnectedness requires that we slow down, listen and observe both the effect and the opposite effect caused by every single action and moment,” Montgomery says. Her rondo-form five part work for piano and strings explores “action and reaction, dark and light, stagnant and swift”.

Jambazian led these vibrant movements of musical contrasts with a showman’s skill – so energetic that he was bouncing out of his seat at one moment, calm and serene for some Messiaen-like bells the next.

Omega Ensemble performs Inner Landscapes at The Joan, Penrith, 16 July.