Lamon says of her anniversary, “I feel Tafelmusik is at an all‐time high with the new projects and artistic collaborations we have been creating. The orchestra is enjoying much success on the national and international stage. Our recording projects have been both creative and stimulating, as has been our exploration of broader repertoire. We have been working with tremendously talented young musicians not only in our training programmes, but now on our mainstage. In my 30 years at Tafelmusik, I have never experienced such an outpouring of talent and creativity.”

When asked what convinced her to stay with Tafelmusik so long Lamon replies, “before coming to Toronto I had been a freelancer. I was often hired to be concertmaster, and my job was to make the orchestra sound as good as possible so that the conductor could focus on interpretation. Each time we’d start from the beginning and everything sounded horrible, and we’d work and work to try to get it to sound better. By the end you’d have a great sense of accomplishment and everybody felt very positive about what we’d achieved together. But then, next thing you know you go back to the beginning again with a new group. It’s like Sisyphus rolling the rock up the hill only to have it roll back down so that he has to do it again – my musical life felt a bit like that.

“So even though we weren’t great the first year I was here at Tafelmusik, we could build on what we’d achieved – putting a program together we’d work very hard and we’d get it to a certain point, and we’d perform, and then we’d start with the next programme from where we left off, so we weren’t starting from square one. It’s so satisfying to work with a consistent group of musicians who are all committed to making music and making it just a little bit better, always. And that hasn’t changed.

“That’s the beauty of Tafelmusik – we have consistency of players, so we can constantly build our own sound, our own interpretation – what we did last week will inform and improve what we do this week. It’s a cumulative thing, and I think it has exponential benefits.”

We look forward to continuing Jeanne’s anniversary celebrations when Tafelmusik arrives in Australia in March!

Seven years old.

What led you specialise in historical music?

It was a fluke, really. I was at Indiana University doing my Master’s degree and there was an orchestra requirement… every day for 2 years. I had heard that the conductors there were terrible, and I was dreading the experience. A new friend said, “How about baroque orchestra instead? There is NO CONDUCTOR!” I was reluctant, but after spending 3 minutes with the new instrument (baroque violin) playing some solo Bach, I was hooked for life.

Do you play contemporary music?

A bit. I’d like to do more.

The program is played entirely from memory. What effect does this have on the performance?

The players are much more engaged, having fun, watching each other, dancing together while playing. We know the music inside out, and this creates a very dynamic interpretation.

What was the first record you ever bought?

The Wallets…a local band in Minneapolis that I used to go see as a teen.

What are you listening to at the moment?

I’m listening to the House of Dreams CD over and over and playing along…learning the next Tafelmusik program for memory!

Which living artist do you admire most and why?

There are too many to mention. I feel incredibly lucky to be in Tafelmusik, and I never cease to be amazed when I see my colleagues perform.

Tafelmusik has toured all over the world. What is your favourite destination?

I’d have to say it’s a tie between Spain and Italy.

What can Australian audiences expect from The Galileo Project?

They can expect to see something truly unique, a wonderful blend of beautiful images, historical context, great stories by an amazing actor, and Tafelmusik musicians playing their hearts out.

How did you start your association with Musica Viva?

I suppose I was not the typical volunteer/subscriber, as I rarely went to Musica Viva concerts. My interest in chamber music, rather sketchy during my working life, only grew after I retired, as I had more time to practise, and I think it was Peter Bridgwood (another volunteer) who gave me a number to ring if I wanted to be a volunteer. This was over three years ago.

What type of music do you listen to?

I listen to whatever the ABC or 2MBS broadcast, but strangely I don’t often put on a CD. I suppose I would listen to more opera if I chose to spend more time listening. My collection is pretty conventional; I occasionally buy 20th century music, out of duty perhaps? But that doesn’t mean I listen to it much, alas.

Do you play any musical instruments?

Apart from childhood recorder lessons, and adult singing lessons, I have played the piano virtually all my life. Like Oscar Wilde’s Algernon, I play with wonderful expression – anyone can play accurately! It’s such a pity the wonderful expression is hard to recognise in the forest of mistakes. I am making an effort to be a bit more reliable. I notice that the pianists who get the best chamber music partners seem to play with remarkably little expression, but tend to play all the notes in the right order.

Do you do other work outside Musica Viva? What kind of work?

I have done quite a lot of work for the State Library, and still do one session a month as a Shakespeare Room host. I would like to do more translating, particularly fiction. I did quite a lot of that when I first retired, but the work needs to be chased, and I am too easily daunted by lack of success.

What kind of work do you do at Musica Viva?

Of course I stuff envelopes with everyone else (and I actually quite like doing it for short bursts). My continuing task however has been to help Peter Bridgwood with the project of scanning all the old programme notes to make them available to writers so they don’t have to start from scratch in the future. I correct the sometimes amusing, but usually tedious, errors made by the scanner, which has trouble with anything not English; composer’s names and tempo markings, for instance, and sometimes even has trouble with normal English! The best error was the mysterious reference to “Fauré’s hormonal changes” which turned out to be harmless “harmonic” changes! It is quite educational work, as I have to read about music I am often not familiar with, and sometimes this prompts me to listen to it. A case in point is Ravel (we are up to Shostakovich, alphabetically!). I found I knew far too little of his music, and I bought what turned out to be an excellent biography.

Why do you volunteer your time for Musica Viva?

Well, I suppose the work does make me feel vaguely useful, and I don’t spurn the free tickets! However, I have to echo what Peter said on his birthday – the office is a particularly congenial one, and people seem (mostly!) to put up with my eccentricities – some of the staff being pleasantly eccentric themselves, and the others sensible enough to realise that humouring is the least troublesome policy.

He has led an extraordinary life in the arts – and, stabbing aside, has loved every minute of it, writes Barney Zwartz.

LIKE many children in the 1950s, Peter Burch played the piano but then made a massive contribution to Australian music: he stopped.

That is how Burch puts it but 50 years of music lovers in Melbourne are much in his debt, especially for the past 31 years he has spent as Victorian head of chamber music organisation Musica Viva, plus stints on such bodies as the Arts Council of Australia.

Arts administrators must be affable yet steel willed, patient but persevering, be able to network with ministers and millionaires yet soothe stormy subscribers and artists. They must have hides like a wintering rhinoceros, be half tyrant, half doormat and flexible as a python. Burch is the complete menagerie and has a wicked, waspish wit that helps ensure he is a marvellous meal companion.

He chooses to lunch at Bamboo House, a regular haunt he regards as probably Melbourne’s best Chinese restaurant, though far from the most expensive. The restaurant is formal yet intimate and one wall is lined with framed awards that Burch says continue on the wall around the corner.

”Are you happy if I order?” he asks and chooses three entrees and a main course to share: scallops with ginger and shallots, which prove to be the best I’ve tasted; fluffy omelet with crab, which is possibly even more delicious; a minced chicken dish served on lettuce; and Peking duck, accompanied by jasmine tea.

His love affair with Chinese food began while growing up in Bendigo. ”There were a couple of cafes – it would be absurd to call them restaurants – the Golden Dragon and the Toi Shan. They were full every evening. On Friday, Saturday and Sunday, all the locals would drive in, bringing in big saucepans, order from the menu, then struggle back to the car – and it was always fried rice, never steamed.”

His palate is more educated now, he says, thanks to places such as Bamboo House.

He was born in 1945 into ”a golden era. It was the best time to be born in the country. Absolutely nothing seemed impossible. Bendigo had all the qualities of a city and the innocence of a country town.”

There were a couple of musical societies, run by spinsters of advancing age, whom his father described as ”unclaimed treasures”. They provided a rich musical diet and the young Burch heard such musicians as soprano Nancy Grant and pianist Ronald Farren-Price.

”The ABC brought out [French pianist] Philippe Entremont. He was this wispy, incredibly thin man with big eyes. I took his hand and firmly shook it, and he said, ‘Ow’, and quickly withdrew it,” Burch says with splendid scorn. ”I was only about 10.”

After a year at Monash University and two at cinema chain Hoyts, he returned to Bendigo for a stint on the radio station with its unfortunate call sign, 3BO, and loved it. ”Radio in the country is very different, very much part of the community. It does local stock reports, local stories and funeral announcements were read on air at one minute to six every night.”

One night, when he got into a taxi on leaving work, the driver asked him: ”Didn’t I just hear you on the radio?”

”Actually, yes.”

”So what do you do for a living, mate?”

It was an epiphany, Burch says; he realised he could not believe he was paid to talk and play music.

Next came three years with theatrical managers J.C. Williamson, working in every department, mentored by people who had done it for decades and tending stars such as singer Charles Aznavour and violinist Yehudi Menuhin.

Burch remembers Menuhin as a charming man with an excitable wife, Diana, who had been the last ballerina cast by Diaghilev. She brought a collection of vacuum flasks containing concoctions to sustain Menuhin but the cleaner at the Windsor hotel emptied them down the toilet after smelling them. Here was an early lesson in crisis management: what could Burch do?

”Nothing. It was Saturday night and everything was shut. Menuhin just had to survive on hotel food.”

At the end of the 1960s, Burch was asked by the Victorian Opera and Australian Ballet to manage both companies. At the opera, he achieved near miracles. He got arts minister Dick Hamer to raise the subsidy from $500 a year to about $20,000, brought in a powerful board – including luring Joan Hammond from retirement to be a public face – appointed Richard Divall as an innovative music director and introduced a successful schools program.

He was poached by Musica Viva in 1980 and, after three decades, he still loves his job.

”My whole life, there have been wonderful things and I have met extraordinary people. Melbourne has such wonderful stuff. The problem in Melbourne is not what to go to but what to miss.”

Then there are the people. A life-long bachelor, he says: ”If you’re not married, the quality of your friends is the quality of your life.”

Burch has one public achievement that surely makes him unique among arts supremos: he was awarded a bravery medal for disarming a knife-wielding woman, and getting stabbed in the process, in 2002. It was a twilight concert at Collins Street Baptist Church, he recalls. ”Everyone was inside the church, and I heard a distant voice, ‘I’ve been stabbed! Help me!’ Then the voice said it again, more urgently. I turned around and this little street woman, all rugged up, was walking towards me holding a Bowie knife, razor-sharp, pushing it to and away from herself very slowly.”

He grabbed the arm holding the knife and lifted it, as others rushed to help.

”Inside the church there were 200 old ladies grabbing their mobiles and dialling 000. It was like a Mel Brooks comedy.”

Surreal but not so funny. One of the victims spent six months in hospital, stabbed in the bowel and pancreas. With Burch, the knife penetrated his belt, trousers, and 10 centimetres into his body.

A thinner man would have had vital organs ruptured. Burch has provided yet one more public service: a reason not to diet.

Many years ago in Sydney, moments before I was due on stage, the stage manager breezily mentioned that the composer might be in the audience. I fled to the bathroom and locked the door, scanning the walls for a window through which I might escape. The composer was Carl Vine; the piece was his Piano Sonata no. 1.

Terrifyingly, Vine prefaces the sonata with a set of instructions for the performer:

Tempo markings throughout this score are not suggestions but indications of absolute speed. Rubato should only be employed when directed, and then only sparingly. Romantic interpretation of melodies, phrases and gestures should be avoided wherever possible.

Under the composer’s scrutiny, would I be able to compute the difference between 144 beats per minute and 146? And what exactly did “absolute speed” mean? Was there really no margin for error? Why couldn’t all composers have the good grace to be dead and buried and past the point of protest?

There were no windows in the bathroom, so I trudged reluctantly back to the stage. As I bowed, I scanned the audience for Vine’s distinctive presence: the large patrician head, the statesman’s bearing. Then I realised he wasn’t there after all, and sat down to play with a small disappointment.

“If performers play it wrong, I’d prefer they didn’t play it at all,” Vine tells me, in his immaculate Sydney apartment overlooking Hyde Park. At 57, he still commands any room he enters, though his chiselled features are etched into a softer stone. “My third string quartet wasn’t really played properly until eight years after it was written. The premiere was execrable. The second performance was worse. I thought, this piece is an abject failure.”

It was only when he heard the Goldner String Quartet perform it in 2007 that he recognised the work he had written. “And I burst into tears. It was just surprise, that it really was a piece of music.”

Hearing this, I feel a new sympathy for living composers, for the way they are held hostage by performers. How painful it must be to see your baby publicly executed on stage, or not to be able to recognise it as your own. Still, Vine’s fastidiousness exceeds the norm, possibly because of his own background as performer.

Born in Perth, Vine took up the piano at age ten, after falling out a tree and fracturing his spine, forcing him to abandon the trumpet. It was the piano that awakened him to a world of compositional possibilities – the discovery that “you could actually have more than one melody at a time.” An adolescent encounter with the German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen inspired a period as a teenage modernist: “I believed that with the transformative power of the brilliance of my mind, my music could change the world.”

After a brief dalliance with nuclear physics, while moonlighting as a concert pianist and composer, Vine moved to Sydney and founded the contemporary music ensemble Flederman with trombonist Simone de Haan. “Flederman was a very robust ensemble and we would abuse each other roundly. And we did some very fine performances of music, very accurate and very good. So that was my training ground. You get it right. You play it right.”

Vine’s music at this time was “terribly clever, terribly studied, and contained lots of good and expansive techniques”. It was only in 1985, when asked to compose a piece to commemorate a young friend who had died of AIDS, that he questioned this approach. “I realised that the way I was composing didn’t convey anything about me. And so in that piece I actually went back to a chorale and wrote a simple scale-based melody with some chunky triads beneath it. At the time I thought, this is incredibly daring. It went completely against the modernist ethos. I’m pretty sure I hadn’t written a major triad since high school.”

In the composition fraternity of the mid ’80s, this was indeed a daring move. “There was a sort of warfare going on, and I was a turncoat. One reviewer to this day cannot review my work without using the word ‘mawkish’.”

Despite the protests, Vine continued to seek a new way of writing, alongside a new rationale for writing. “I worked out over many years that I don’t relate to other people particularly well. This is a way for me to link people, to link into their minds. I don’t have to talk. I don’t have to look at them. I don’t have to work out what to do with my hands or with my feet.”

He had to find a new vocabulary. “I didn’t just want to write I–IV–V–I chord sequences. Where was I actually going with this? That’s a question I’m still answering.” Unlike a writer of prose, who can at least accept the premise of a mother tongue, a composer has to state the rules or invent them in each new piece, before getting down to the business of story. Vine’s new style, as it emerged, was as rigorous as that which preceded it, in which complex rhythms are built into rich, kinetic textures, set alongside an austere lyricism that is all the more moving for its restraint.

The first piano sonata dates back to 1990, five years after his conversion. Championed by pianist Michael Kieran Harvey, the sonata quietly colonised the competitions and conservatories of the United States. The Five Bagatelles for Piano, composed in 1994, has enjoyed a similar popularity in the United Kingdom. Vine is disparaging of the bagatelles, which he composed in just ten days, and yet they contain his style in microcosm: the motoric and jazz influences, the command of sonority and space, and those brief, heart-stopping moments of lyricism, when the cosmic textures compress to something singular, to the human voice.

Despite his international success, in 1998 Vine entered a period of burn-out. “I had been working terribly hard for 30 years, but what was it all for? I had eight commissions outstanding, and no ideas.” He paid back $40,000 for outstanding commissions and reinvented himself as a computer programmer, a pursuit he found “almost as satisfying as writing music, but even more isolating”. His planned two-year sabbatical extended to three years, and then to four, and might have lasted longer had there not been a phone call from Musica Viva, the national chamber music organisation, seeking a new artistic director.

Vine agreed to attend the interview, it seems, out of sport. “I was in my worst, most callous and offhand character role. I told them I didn’t particularly like chamber music. When they asked what I would do with Musica Viva, I said: ‘Give me a string quartet and I’ll put Kylie Minogue with it.’ I was definitely trying to be incendiary but their eyes lit up. And my response was, Hello! This is not the stately old lady I was expecting.”

Vine accepted the position but – possibly to the relief of Musica Viva audiences – never did combine Kylie Minogue with a string quartet. Instead, he devised a new science of programming, based on four tenets of “quality, diversity, challenge and joy”. He also embarked on an intensive study of chamber music, discovering that he did rather like the genre after all. “I knew Beethoven had written late quartets, but it was only by having to hear them performed by some of the greatest ensembles in the world that it dawned on me that this is miraculous.”

The new role thrust him into the role of public figure, so that he was forced to talk, and look at people, and work out where to put his hands and feet. “I still have a touch of the curmudgeon. But all of those postures are of course self-protective. And when it comes to Musica Viva I don’t need to protect myself.”

Whether it was the enforced conviviality or the miracle of late Beethoven, Vine abandoned computer code and returned to music. The last few years have been particularly prolific. Next year sees the premiere of his second piano concerto, performed by Piers Lane and the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, and a set of songs for soprano and strings, performed by Danielle de Niese and the Australian Chamber Orchestra. Vine will be sitting in the audience, seeking to recognise his young. The performers had better get it right, but one suspects they will.

Aislinn Nosky. Photo (c) Matthew Marigold.

What led you specialise in historical music?

When I was studying violin in school I started to notice how much fun the people who were studying Early Music seemed to be having and I wanted in on the action too!

Do you play contemporary music?

I do play contemporary music whenever I have the opportunity. I am interested in anything and everything which can be played on a violin.

The program is played entirely from memory. What effect does this have on the performance?

Not having to be tied down to the physical location of the musical score allows us a lot more freedom of movement than in a more traditional orchestral performance.

What was the first record you ever bought?

I remember very clearly being presented with a cassette of Michael Jackson’s Thriller by my older brother. I think his friends had decided that Michael Jackson was no longer “cool”. I guess I really am a child of the ’80s!

What are you listening to at the moment?

After a long day at work where I am constantly listening to music I love, I find that I like to relax by listening to books on tape. Right now I am working my way through Middlemarch by George Eliot. At 27 cds in length it is going to take me a while!

Which living artist do you admire most and why?

That would be the rest of my colleagues who make up the core Tafelmusik orchestra. I can’t believe how lucky I am to get to work with such interesting and creative musicians.

Tafelmusik has toured all over the world. What is your favourite destination?

Australia is top of my list! For a mild-mannered Canadian, I am pretty patriotic. I have a fantasy that Australia will be a lot like Canada…but warmer! It really sounds like paradise on Earth to me!

What can Australian audiences expect from The Galileo Project?

Australian audiences can expect a dynamic and thought-provoking glimpse in to the life and times of Galileo Galilei. Alison Mackay has designed a stunningly beautiful show for the eyes and the ears.

IN MAY 1999, CANADIAN ASTRONAUT JULIE Payette, preparing for her maiden flight to the International Space Station, packed only the bare essentials: oxygen, water, food and a recording of baroque ensemble Tafelmusik performing Handel’s Messiah. The astronaut, herself a soprano and former member of the Tafelmusik choir, accompanied the recording to the galaxy’s outer reaches and, on playing it, exposed it to the stars.

“Yes, we’ve been played up there, in space,” boasts concept and program director Alison Mackay. And the Toronto-based orchestra is not coming back to earth any time soon. In Tafelmusik’s The Galileo Project: Music of the Spheres – touring Australia for Musica Viva in March – the period-instrument ensemble plays to the choreographed cues of high-definition telescopic images of the universe.

“It really is unique,” says Mackay, who has played double bass in the orchestra since its inception in 1979. “The audience will see a set piece with a giant round screen on to which are projected some 8o astronomical images as the orchestra plays.”

The unconventional concert, conceived in 2009 as part of celebrations for the 400th anniversary of the astronomical telescope, is held together by narrator Shaun Smyth, an actor who co-ordinates the affair with text referencing figures of the baroque, from Galileo to Newton. Mackay says while the chronological resonance between baroque music and Galileo is apparent, the parallels run far deeper.

“Galileo was himself an accomplished musician, and his family played a big part in the birth of opera,” she says, adding that the astronomer’s father was a prominent lutenist and musical theorist. “To make connections between the music and the universe and to share the sounds of baroque music the way people would have originally heard it, on the instruments of the time, is very exciting.”

The 17-piece ensemble will traverse Vivaldi, Monteverdi, Handel and Bach, among other baroque composers, as part of its maiden tour of Australia. Playing without scores, the musicians take their cues from images projected on to the giant screen and from music director Jeanne Lamon. “We had a longstanding dream of playing a show from memory,” Mackay says, “and it all came together with this project.”

In what is now a three-year collaboration, the Hubble telescope and some of the world’s leading astro-photographers donated the interplanetary images used. At some performances, astronomers have set up telescopes “so the musicians and the audience can see the sky the way Galileo would have seen it … The experience is quite profound, and I hope there might be a time or two when this might happen in Australia,” Mackay says.

Tafelmusik – a term common during the 17th and 18th centuries which, translated from German, means table music, or music for a feast – was founded 32 years ago. Mackay has watched it expand from a modest ensemble to the globe-trotting troupe it is today.

“We do about 100 performances a year and we tour regularly,” Mackay says. “We do travel, a lot But the important thing is we still manage to feel like a family.”

The idea for this project came originally from a Tafelmusik subscriber, Dr John Percy, Professor of Astronomy at the University of Toronto, an expert on variable stars and stellar evolution, and former president of both the Royal Astronomical Society and the Royal Canadian Institute. He proposed a theatrically staged concert of baroque music on a stellar theme to celebrate the 400th anniversary in 2009 of Galileo’s use of the astronomical telescope.

The Galileo Project in performance

The creative powerhouse behind the project is Alison Mackay, who has played violone and double bass with Tafelmusik since it was founded in 1979. Her previous directorial achievements with the ensemble include a festival in Toronto of music, art, dance, film and theatre inspired by Ovid’s Metamorphoses; a multi-cultural creation entitled “The Four Seasons”; and a celebration of architecture and the arts called “Sacred Spaces, Sacred Circles”.

Alison spent a year collecting ideas and writings for the show, and discussing musical choices with Music Director Jeanne Lamon, to best illustrate historic events, astronomical discoveries and images of the stars from the Hubble Space Telescope.

Louis XIV, the French “Sun King” at Versailles, for instance, created a “Palace of the Sun” to reflect the cosmology of the ancient world. Jean-Baptiste Lully, resident composer at Versailles, wrote some of his most magnificent music for the opera Phaeton, which is included in the production to exemplify the very immediate cultural links between music of the period and observations of the early stargazers.

Claudio Monteverdi’s ground-breaking opera, Orfeo, was composed in 1607 and first published in Venice in 1609, the year that Galileo took his newly created telescope from Padua to Venice as a gift for the Venetian Doge. Monteverdi was an exact contemporary with, and an acquaintance of Galileo, whose nephew, Alberto Galilei, composed the lute solo in the first half of the programme.

The musical, philosophical and scientific parallels continue through to Sir Isaac Newton, George Frideric Handel and Phillip Telemann in the eighteenth century, rounding out not with a sleep, but with reflections on the ancient concept of the “Music of the Spheres” – the music believed to be created by an ensemble of planets and stars moving through the heavens. The concert opens with a speech on the same theme from The Merchant of Venice: “There’s not the smallest orb which thou behold’st but in his motion like an angel sings, still quiring to the young-eyed cherubins.”

The overall effect is edifying and inspiring, as well as being wonderfully vivacious entertainment. We might have just missed the International Year of Astronomy (2009), but at least we get to see Tafelmusik!

Carl Vine
Artistic Director

Classical music wraps all of this potential into perfectly formed parcels of sonic architecture that may be revisited over and over: glorious castles sculpted from the air itself, carefully hewn and honed to the finest burnish, that truly come to life only when performers meet audiences in a collective contract of shared joy.

There are few better examples of this sublime communion than The Galileo Project presentation of Canada’s pre-eminent period music ensemble, Tafelmusik, which opens our 2012 season. This project was commissioned expressly to weave astronomy, mathematics, history and music together into a rich audio-visual tapestry that informs and enthrals as much as it entertains.

Chamber music arrives in more familiar form with the welcome return of Musica Viva’s most popular string quartet for the last three decades, the Takács Quartet, in phenomenal programs of Janáček, Britten, Ravel and Debussy. The St Lawrence String Quartet also makes a repeat appearance, this time accompanied by celebrated oboist, Australia’s own Diana Doherty.

The Kuss Quartet from Germany marks its Australian debut, joined by Principal Viola of the Berlin Philharmonic Naoko Shimizu, featuring monumental string quintets by Mozart and Brahms. Divine Parisian excellence arrives in the form of Trio Dali, three dazzling young soloists who are just beginning to impress the world with the exceptional quality of their ensemble performances.

Five remarkable singers from East Germany form the group Amarcord which provides our vocal virtuosity for the year in extraordinary, inventive programs called “The Singing Club” and “Murder and Other Situations”. The concert season comes to a classic close with the brilliant British violinist Anthony Marwood, together with Aleksandar Madzar, renowned pianist and sought-after artistic collaborator.

Our Featured Composer for 2012 will be Australia’s Gordon Kerry, who provides five exciting pillars of the program: a piano trio, a violin sonata, two string quartets and the world premiere of a newly commissioned string quintet. His compositions exemplify the view of classical music as exquisite gems – the work of a master craftsman who teases out the strongest elements of an idea to make a powerful whole supported by its own intricate finery.

Music can raise us to the sublime, or occasionally just elicit a chuckle. I wager that our selection for 2012 will cover at least that much territory.

Carl Vine
Artistic Director

Carl Vine

Recent analysis in the mainstream media suggests that people are currently less likely to spend their money on ‘things’, but more likely to buy ‘experiences’. Events like music festivals, or a Musica Viva concert, fit the bill perfectly. Experiences can last a lifetime and don’t require dusting, feeding, watering, storage, upgrades or replacement batteries. They are handmade by people who have spent a lifetime honing their craft, and remind us all of the incredible heights that can be reached through sheer determination and indomitable spirit. If you enjoyed any Musica Viva concerts this year, perhaps some of your friends or family might enjoy this kind of opportunity next year. (To put not too fine a point on it, Musica Viva gift vouchers make lovely presents!)

Musicians don’t really get holidays. Practice remains a daily discipline even when they take a break from performing, and composers never stop thinking about music even if they’re not actually writing any down. Although the Musica Viva staff takes a break across Christmas and New Year, it is otherwise a surprisingly busy time of year for us. Our loyal box office personnel keep making sure that our subscribers are happy, and start selling the first ‘single’ tickets for the 2012 season (the amazing Tafelmusik ‘Galileo Project’ concerts).

But ‘tis the season to be jolly, and I hope you have much to make you so. May you have a refreshing summer break and I hope to see you in concert halls around Australia next year.

Carl Vine
Artistic Director