Resonance and repetition at the Sydney Festival

Two weeks in, Olivia Ansell's final year as Sydney Festival Director has yet to hit the headlines – either artistically or due to controversy – but a chamber music series titled Resonance has challenged four local units to come up with programmes that respond to the theme, "truth, destiny, and what we leave behind". Bach left behind? Not quite when the Bach Akademie Australia traced the harmony of the spheres through to Indigenous composer, Troy Russell's work, Clans. Or when Lotte Betts-Dean sang a mezzo range from Barbara Strozzi to Bjork.

The Omega Ensemble failed to perform any music dated earlier than 2009, but found their “resonance” in Missy Mazzoli's Dark with Excessive Bright, her own reduced version of her Grammy-nominated double bass concerto, its title borrowed from Milton's Paradise Lost. "A surreal and evocative description of God," explains Mazzoli, "written by a bilnd man". Apart from evoking "the heartrending sound of the double bass", the title also inspired the composer to listen to Baroque and Renaissance music while writing, although the work's original commissioners at the Australian Chamber Orchestra had also engaged her with tales of their 1580 bass, lost for 400 years in a monastery, collecting the music of passing centuries in every fibre of its battered woodwork.

It's hard to imagine any 1580 bassist matching young Sydney Symphony player, Jaan Pallandi who showed off the full range of his 21st-century skills in a performance with demanding runs down to the stygian depths of his fingerboard, bariolage, double-stopping and harmonics, plus some demonic rhythmic shifts. An angry, almost ugly solo stood out; then duelling basses with quintet player Ben Ward sealed the deal on this wholehearted performance.

The concert had started with three of Philip Glass’ Etudes from pianist Vatche Jambazian. The first's repetition was cut Glass, but much emotion was added in the second – delicate repetition in the left hand, Jambazian sitting rigid to emphasise the stillness. The third offered a massive exercise in dissociation between his hands. Bryce Dessner's quartet, Aheym followed with a distinct Glassian flavour in its repeated rhythms, each player getting to set the tone in turn, building to a climax with fiendish bariolage and four flashing bows.

The final work was a re-run of Omega's July world premiere of Samuel Adams' septet, Lighthouse. Neil Thompson on viola, returning from the premiere, stood out in this work where a single note often reflected the revolving, regular beam of the lighthouse beacon. Oddly, Adams’ own notes suggest that it opens with "incandescent flashes" on the piano. Instead, Jambazian chose to give us a dreamy opening, which then built to mighty sea waves and yet more portentous repetition – which might well be seen as the resonant theme of this concert.