Violinist Richard Tognetti tells Virginia Trioli there's a fine line between success and failure
For the virtuoso violinist Richard Tognetti, the difference between success and failure is as fine as a single ridge of his fingerprint.
He demonstrates, as I sit with my nose to his violin bow, trying to detect on the strings a finger movement that could be measured in microns.
Richard's compelling performances have earned him an impressive international reputation.
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Supplied: Aaron Smith
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He begins to climb the daily music scales that he can never afford to shirk, talking me through each picked out note — good and bad.
He starts playing: "Flat! Start again," he barks at himself. A good note, a good note and then … "Bad string crossing!" Another note: "Sharp!" Then … "Flat! Bad shift! Squeaky!"
I'm laughing now — this is a pitiless performance, Richard's dread of scales just as alive for him today as the leader of the acclaimed Australian Chamber Orchestra (ACO) as it was when he was a seven-year-old "street urchin".
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On pink background, Virginia Trioli faces side and smiles, with text: Creative Types with Virginia Trioli.
Richard finds the problem: "Now this is what I was talking about," he says waggling his little finger at me. "That's out of tune — and you can't even see the finger moving!"
No, I really can't. And to be honest, I can't even tell the notes that Richard says were bad — they all sounded superb to me.
But the line of work that first called to Richard as a child in Wollongong is one that requires a measure of exactitude that is shared by precision engineers and the Baroque geniuses who carved the violins he plays.
It's the key to his success: that the work, the very hard work of remaining exceptional, is what he wakes to do.
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In conversation with me for an episode of Creative Types, Richard is playful but fractious, expansive in his thoughts about the antique classical music that he makes so vividly current with his ensemble, and yet still a little defensive about the battle to maintain the excellence it requires.
I can hear that there is still a prickle under his collar.
"Every idea that I've had and that I've implemented has been met with a big thick wall and a bunch of naysayers," Richard tells me.
"You asked me about what I learned at the beginning? I was very defensive and argumentative, maybe a bit aggressive. Now I just go about my business and wait … I play more the Pied Piper … they all come around the wall, eventually."
The ACO has been described by some of the world's leading music critics as the best chamber orchestra alive.
But it's clear that's never going to be enough for Richard.
He seems to need to share his restlessness with others, casting for provocative and stimulating collaborations with filmmakers, artists, contemporary, classical and rock musicians like Jimmy Barnes to see if there's anything else on the other side of that wall that's worth sharing.
"Why the collaborations? Because our repertoire is about that big," Richard says, his fingers a millimetre apart. "People have earmarked a date … and paid money … and I want to give them an experience that astral travel takes them on — an extraordinary trip."
Photo shows
Virginia Trioli and Kate Ceberano stand together smiling in a room with art on wall behind them.
In the 1980s, Kate Ceberano was experiencing the wrong kind of recognition: backlash for snide comments she'd made about Kylie Minogue.
When I visit him, the orchestra is rehearsing in collaboration with the mesmerising Scottish guitarist, Sean Shibe, for a sequence of old and new Scottish music.
In a wildly beautiful piece, incorporating spoken word and electric guitar, Richard, Sean and the players read each other just as they do the music on their stands. As ever, there is no conductor, but they respond to each other like the surface of skin.
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People look at it as being magic … They're just really subtle nuances that we read from each other. It's not just a sonic transmission.
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It's also a kind of confidence game, an enmeshed state of skill and instinct.
But even so, Richard says that when he is in the thick of it, playing perhaps a Bach fugue and producing several voices at once from the one strike of the bow, he can't think about it too much: "It's a bit like the story of the centipede who is asked, 'Which foot do you move first?' and could never walk again."
Watch Creative Types with Virginia Trioli: Richard Tognetti on Tuesday May 6 at 8.30pm on ABC TV, or stream the whole series now on
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