Years of Passion: An interview with Richard Tognetti

By Peter Craven

Richard Tognetti and his wife, Australian Chamber Orchestra Principal Violin Satu Vänskä, are on their way to Hong Kong to play at Tai Kwun’s Prison Yard Festival. Having been delayed by security, Tognetti is now in an airport lounge waiting to board. When I tell him I’m “blind, lame and deaf”, he laughs and says, “Well, I’m lame, a loser and en route.”

Tognetti has been the Artistic Director of the Australian Chamber Orchestra for 35 years now – he was appointed when he was 24 – and is simultaneously about to celebrate the Orchestra’s 50th anniversary. He’s chosen to open the Season with Brahms’s joy-filled Violin Concerto and Beethoven’s sombre and stormy Seventh Symphony. Though it turns out the symphony is a bit more complex than that.

I ask Tognetti what leading one of the world’s incontestably grand chamber orchestras represents to this boy from Wollongong. “Well, it’s still pretty fervent,” he says. “The fire hasn’t gone out. I’m still stupidly ambitious as only a Southern Hemispherian can be. And I’m still really curious to see how canonical works can appear in fresh contexts. I’m always driven to play for people who have never heard the music before. That’s been a constant with me.”

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Does he think that Australia’s relative isolation feeds a desire to conquer the world? “Yeah, it really does,” he admits. “But not conquer the world in the sense of standing on stage and bowing to merely traditional expectations. But by defining a certain nationalism.”

You can hear the intensity in Tognetti’s voice. “We’re all here,” he says. “We’re huddled on these coasts, we’ve got this amazing interior which we rarely look towards, and we’re still trying to describe it. It’s really clumsy. And it actually feels more clumsy 35 years later. So I’m still challenged by that...”

The ACO’s international success is striking. Is there a particular kind of ratification and satisfaction in getting rave reviews from shows at, say, London’s Barbican? “Yeah,” he says. “But that’s feeding the rat. You can never get enough and you’ll always want more. And you need to keep it in check. Otherwise it gets in the way of trying to create something.”

He agrees that without that international validation he “probably would have left”, but says it can be hard having to rest on laurels that are patronisingly given. “Let’s say we played extraordinarily well but we’re still called the Australian Chamber Orchestra – there remains an extreme prejudice against Southern Hemispherians. And that Northern Hemisphere prejudice won’t change for a hundred years. At least.”

Tognetti grew up in Wollongong and took off for the Sydney Conservatorium High School at 11. At 17 he continued tertiary study at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music. I remind him that there are photos of him playing a violin when he was six. “There were other kids who were in the same position who didn’t end up playing the violin,” he says. “It’ s just that I grabbed it. I did not live in a rarified atmosphere.” He laughs.          

“Wollongong in the 1970s was very much Meatloaf. But the day I went to the Conservatorium– literally the first day – I met this bass player and he gave me a cassette of Bruckner and I found a lyricism there that I didn’t know existed. So I suppose that’s where it came from. Later on I discovered punk, and much later on I found the German new wave people and electronica – if it’s electronica, of course; it wasn’t really alive back then.”

Tognetti is a surfer and sees the moment of riding a wave – in music or the sea – as akin to the Zen state of detachment. “When things go okay –which is all too rarely – you’re not thinking, Oh wow, I played that phrase in a way that I think Ligeti or Beethoven might have been happy with. You just have this sense of nothingness. You just think, well, what’s it all about? But that nothingness is, I think, an enviable place. But most of the time, as with surfing, you’re just in a state of wipe-out.”

The Seventh is a towering symphony for which Tognetti has assembled an expanded ACO featuring gut strings and period wind instruments, making authenticity the counterpoint for a radically contemporary vision. For both pieces he’s importing a great swag of musicians to join him in the endeavour. Some are talents from the ACO’s Emerging Artist Program and there’s also a brace of woodwind and brass players.



He brings a classic alive by reimagining it as absolutely contemporary, as if it is an ACO commission. “I’m of the strong belief that if you’re going to play anything from the canon, it shouldn’t just be rinse and repeat,” he says. “My way of looking at it is that Brahms delivered the Violin Concerto to me last week and I’m grappling with it and it’s really difficult and dense and strange in its conception. And it’s the same for the Beethoven.”

“So is he immune to the anxiety of influence? Brahms’ s Violin Concerto was famously done by Heifetz and then there’s Vengerov around the corner.

“Of course, but I try to ignore it,” he says. “I’m totally inspired by Heifetz’s sound and some of the particular aspects of phrasing. But as far as the whole structure of the piece goes? No, I’m not daunted by those interpretations. I really embrace the challenge I set for myself – and I’m not being hubristic or egotistical – that Brahms has just sent the Violin Concerto to us. We were fortunate to be able to commission him in one of his weak moments. He’s taken a few years to write this concerto for these people Down Under and it’s finally arrived.”

 Tognetti laughs with pleasure at this fantasy, which is also a rigorous aesthetic. “He’s an unknown sort of Austrian–German composer – well, he lives in Austria but grew up in Hamburg – and he was ignored because he was sort of slightly old-fashioned. But I believe in him, and I’m looking forward to presenting this new score to an open-eared and highly temperamental public.”

He’s at pains to admit the realities of the music world. “Most people grew up with Baroque music as their introduction to classical music,” he says. “The Brandenburgs, say. And isn’t that a wonderful thing? But what it also does is set a seal on the listener. You know, the audience member you overhear saying, ‘I prefer my Bach to be slower.’ I’ve got to ignore all that by saying Brahms has just sent us this score and the same thing with Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony. Even more so.”

 I ask him why he’s paired the zestful Brahms with the Seventh. Isn’t Beethoven’s symphony broodingly dark and enigmatic in the most Northern European manner? “Only the slow movement is,” he says. “But the allegretto doesn’t really exemplify its mood at all. And in the last movement of Brahms’s Violin Concerto, which was inspired by [the violinist Joseph] Joachim’s desire for zest, there’s all that Hungarianness and dizziness. The high-minded elitist Europeans hate this aspect which pervades a lot of that music, whereas I, being a bogan from Wollongong, love it.” He’s defiant and self-mocking at the same time. Then he’s pensive again about the Seventh. “With the Beethoven you could argue also that it’s a symphony of extreme contrasts – which is, I think, what sets it alight.”

Tognetti is a showman who believes passionately in the conception of the work he reinterprets, but stays humorous at the same time. He tells me about an evening he spent with the American playwright Edward Albee, which he describes as one of the most memorable of his 35 years at the helm.

“We had an incredible night with him. Well, we had two experiences with him,” he says. “He was like a bird. He had that pokey curiosity that one is attracted to. Endless talking. We went to the opera. It was a double bill, I think – Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas and Handel’s Acis and Galatea? And anyway, it was like a dance party – they had naked men on the stage with Walkmans – and Edward just hated it.

“And so after 10 minutes he looked at me – we were sitting in about the third row, and everyone knew that we were there, or that he was there, we were unknowns – and then he asked, ‘Are you enjoying this?’ in his rather high-pitched, hard-to define American accent. And I, of course, was going to say, ‘Oh yes, I’m thoroughly enjoying it, what do you reckon, my new best friend?’ And I realised he wasn’t and said, ‘Oh, no.’ And he said, ‘Let’s leave. I’m so good at that.’

“So we went to walk out – you know, from the middle aisle, going excuse me, excuse me. And out we walked. Albee thought the director had tampered with the ‘originating force’. He hated it when people tampered with his work – so did Ligeti, interestingly. And my point to him was, ‘Well, one day you’re going to be gone – which was much sooner than one anticipated – then what will happen?”

I ask about Tognetti’s professional and marital relationship with Vänskä. They work together both with the ACO and in its renegade electro-acoustic spin-off band, ACO Underground, which also goes by Satu In The Beyond. How does that work? “When I was making my first surf films, I’d written some hundred tunes that I wanted to be sung by someone. And I asked Satu to just have a go,” says Tognetti. “And I went, holy moly, that’s good. And then there she is singing, side by side, with Meow Meow and Barry Humphries at the Barbican. So, yeah, Satu’s an amazing violinist, and a really wonderful supporter of mine. She’s honest, she’s a sounding board and fiercely independent.”

Tognetti’s new violin, made by Guarneri del Gesù, dates from 1741. Is it superior to a Stradivarius? “Oh, no, I wouldn’t say that. I just think it’s more mysterious, more complex,” he says. “And at the end of the day, a more alluring proposition because they’re rarer. If you want a visual art analogy, I think that it’s more Caravaggio. What’s also interesting about the del Gesù is that it is more shrouded in mystery. We know a lot about Stradivarius. But del Gesù disappeared for a couple of years and they think he might have been involved in a murder. Wasn’t Caravaggio involved in a murder?”

You can tell from the rapt tone in which Tognetti speaks that the violin’s historical mystery has an associative glamour. He’s a fascinating character, full of ambition but with a purity that can encompass all the irony in the world. But the trail of symbolism surrounding the violin is interrupted by the physical problem of boarding a plane with these priceless objects. “Hey, can you just give me a second. Yeah, we’re just moving violins here.” He apologises for sounding distracted. “We were just boarding and fighting off people, you know, dumping their stuff on our violins. But it seems to all still be working, and I haven’t lost my passport.”

 You can see why the nation has so fallen in love with Tognetti and the ACO that much of their funding is self-generated. This is a man who is chuffed that his work with Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood on Water influenced Jane Campion’s decision to ask Greenwood to write the score for The Power of the Dog.

The ACO will confound and enchant its audiences as long as there’s a feeling for why music matters now.