Adventures in Repertoire

Three decades as artistic director of the Australian Chamber Orchestra have taught Richard Tognetti that necessity is the mother of invention, and invention is essential to the health of classical music. Chloe Cutts meets the Antipodean violinist in Sydney to talk commissions, modern string playing and the survival of contemporary repertoire

- Chloe Cutts

Richard Tognetti is musing on the pressures of being a creative with too many influences. You can see his dilemma: the Australian violinist has spent most of his three-decade career at the helm of one of the world’s most artistically diverse and consistently surprising string ensembles, the Australian Chamber Orchestra (ACO), a role that has afforded – indeed necessitated – an explorer’s thirst for discovery. He was appointed artistic director and leader in 1989, taking over founder John Painter’s ensemble from Carl Pini when the orchestra was in its early teens and Tognetti in his early twenties. After rebuilding the ensemble virtually from scratch, the violinist and his band of players set about revisiting the body of works written for string orchestra – ‘which we got through within the first five years’, he laughs.

‘There are very few pieces written for string orchestra,’ he explains, ‘and that’s what makes it so difficult on the one hand and so liberating on the other, because you’ve got to devise your own repertoire. I’m a multi-stylist, and I sometimes find myself over-burdened by the multitude of possibilities.’ The off-track programming, commissioning projects and cross-art collaborations that have become the ensemble’s hallmarks are rooted in a vision shared by Tognetti and the handful of players who stayed on during those early years. ‘It was a totally different orchestra back then, with barely a board of directors and nowhere to rehearse,’ he remembers. ‘We were a motley crew – a lot of people had left and the organisation was in disarray, which is often the best way because if you enter when it’s strong, what do you do? I ended up with a few like-minded characters who wanted to pursue my goals. I didn’t come in with a nuclear bomb, but I certainly intended to change things.’