Being immersed in the sense of wonder and discovery that ANAM musicians bring to each project, encountering repertoire for the first time and hungry to learn, is what brings artists such as Richard Tognetti and Simone Young back to ANAM time after time. (Perhaps it also reminds them of what it was like ‘the first time’, and why they gave their lives to music in the first place.)
Tognetti’s regular ANAM appearances have been consistently thrilling. This year, in the first of two concerts in the St Kilda Town Hall, he will be leading ANAM’s string players from the front chair in Schoenberg’s musical moonlit dreamscape Verklärte Nacht. Schoenberg, music’s bogey man, created in Verklärte Nacht the most ravishing thirty minutes of music for strings that one could ever hope to be drenched in.
Two nights later Tognetti conducts Mahler’s Fourth Symphony, the composer’s most modestly proportioned and most elegiac. It begins with sleighbells and the evocation of a beautiful pastoral scene and ends with
a soprano singing The Heavenly Life, a child’s vision of life in heaven. Its final, gentle lullaby seems to offer a glimpse into eternity and never fails to leave an audience momentarily suspended in rapt contemplation.
Image Credit: Sydney Symphony Orchestra