Driving through central-Victorian town, Heathcote, half an hour east of one of the world’s richest-ever goldfields at Bendigo, you’d be excused for being unaware that it’s not only one of Australia’s most notable wine-growing regions but home to a fascinating Aus-Euro chamber music festival.
The broad highway carves a swathe though the old rural centre without touching or defining it. On its edges is a revival of lodgings and restaurants, brought initially by the region’s fame for producing some of the country’s finest and defining deep red wines in its red Cambrian-rock-derived soils. It’s home to the famous eponymous Heathcote Estate shiraz, Wild Duck Creek, Jasper Hill and Mt Pleasant.
Sanguine Estate is among the rising star wineries of the region. So how felicitous that a vibrant new, yet deeply rooted in European values, chamber music festival should find this as its home. So much that, through not much more than word-of-mouth, in the space of just three years its attendance list has reached capacity.
The festival is the passion of two notable musicians. Chris Howlett is the entrepreneurial cellist who, when he isn’t organising concerts in China, performing with the Melbourne Piano Trio or organising the revival of Music in the Round, manages the Festival. He formed the alliance with Sanguine Estate which dedicates its winery, especially its barrel room lined with 150 oak barrels of recent vintages of its precious wines as a concert hall, to host the festival’s 140-strong audience just prior to each year’s harvest.
It is a festival that is quintessentially Australian with an essence of European tailoring.
Festival-goers here are like pilgrims. The outstanding cast of premier musicians, some with years of European immersion, performing in unique combinations, and the innovative programming reward the sacrifices required to partake in the festivities. Sacrifices like finding accommodation in Heathcote or close by and, now, finding a ticket. But Howlett has a solution for both of these issues – more later.
Howlett’s accomplice is the redoubtable Howard Penny, master cellist and artistic director. Penny was for nearly 30 years a resident of Vienna where he taught and was a regular performer with chamber groups including the Chamber Orchestra of Europe. He maintained an Australian presence by touring with the ACO. He counted among his close friends the violist and noted composer, Brett Dean, who was resident with the Berlin Phil ‘just up the road’.
Through a slow-burn process, Penny came to be infused with the potential of Melbourne’s Australian National Academy of Music – ‘the only thing like it in the world’. He visited while on tour with the ACO and in 2006 was invited as a visiting artist – a life-changing experience. On returning to Vienna, he flew to Berlin for a Dean premiere, whereupon he told Dean, ‘I’m in’. Dean, by now Artistic Director of ANAM, stipulated that ‘in’ meant full-time for half of the academic year. Despite being more than Penny had put his hand up for, he was soon engaged as a teacher at the academy. Three years later he became full-time faculty and is now one of its leading advocates and a mainstay of its program and successful development in recent years.
Penny’s presence attracts a high calibre of performer to the Sanguine Estate Festival. The regulars comprise Brett Dean, Ian Munro (pianist and composer), Paul Wright (guest concertmaster, WASO) and Tobias Breider (Principal Violist, SSO). The support cast is equally impressive and typically includes a European-based performer (in 2015, William Coleman of Berlin’s Kuss Quartet) persuaded both by the quality of the cast and the prospect of spending part of the northern hemisphere winter in an Australian summer and winery.
Sanguinity abounds.
Penny’s history in Vienna helps to explain much of what makes Sanguine tick in an artistic sense. He was continually exposed to rare repertoire played at the height of performance capability. One would think that the imperative for every Australian festival to have an Australian work would present a challenge. It sounds gratuitous to say it that way but some artistic directors approach it like this. In Penny’s hands, this expectation can take you places you might otherwise never go.
This year’s festival was treated to a rousing presentation of an Australian work composed by 19th century virtuoso Ignaz Friedman, ‘hugely admired by Rachmaninov and Horowitz’ says Penny. His Chopin performances were said to be unexcelled.
But Australian? Of Polish nationality, Friedman escaped Europe in the 1940s and took up a post in Sydney with the NSW (now Sydney) Conservatorium. He remained in Sydney until his death in 1948, another virtuosic European immigrant largely unsung in this country, although there is an annual commemorative prize at the conservatorium.
While there, Friedman undertook or completed his piano quintet which lay undisturbed in the vaults of that institution for 60-70 years. Despite years of effort by Ian Munro to bring it into the light, it took the arrival on these shores of Penny – taking the same trip as Friedman but this time coming home rather than fleeing it – to give it its first Australian, first world, performance.
It deserves to continue to be heard. The performance brought the house to its feet. The work is richly layered, multi-faceted and so vital it could almost be termed heroic. The European heritage came through in abundance, yet it was composed in Australia. And what a quintet – Ian Munro, Brett Dean, Howard Penny, Brett Dean, Ian Munro, Paul Wright and lesser-known (as yet) violinist, Caroline Hopson.
The players at next year’s Sanguine Estate Festival will be presented with a work by JD Zelenka (1679-1745) that is still in manuscript despite being composed 300 years ago. Parts will be prepared in Melbourne and the audience will be treated to ‘the real thing, the mother lode’ as Penny enthuses over it.
Penny’s infectious enthusiasm and tireless work ethic reveal a generosity of spirit that is not always to be found in the music world. One senses he is in it for the music, the audience, the students and for the ‘sheer pleasure of finding things out’ as Richard Feynman put it. Melbourne, Australia, and especially Heathcote and Sanguine Estate, are the richer for his dedication.
The 2015 festival will be held 13 – 15 February, Heathcote, Victoria.
www.chrishowlett.net.au/sanguine/2014-music-festival/
