Backstage with Anna Goldsworthy

Anna Goldsworthy (Alex Frayne)Professor Anna Goldsworthy is Director of the Elder Conservatorium of Music at the University of Adelaide, and an award-winning pianist, writer, and festival director. She co-founded the Seraphim Trio in 1995. Her books include the memoir Piano Lessons (2009) and a novel, Melting Moments (2020). Anna has directed numerous music festivals, and in April 2024, will direct the Music and Mountains Festival in Queenstown, New Zealand. What was the first performance that made a deep impression on you? Mstislav Rostropovich playing Bach cello solo suites at the Adelaide Festival when I was thirteen. He sat alone in the middle of the Festival Theatre stage, so very far away, but with enough spiritual authority to hold the entire audience in a single line. And the Chicago Symphony Orchestra with Georg Solti at that same festival, performing Mahler’s Ninth Symphony. Dad had played the record at home for several weeks beforehand, as ambient noise, but nothing prepared me for this sound. It billowed through the theatre like the most voluptuous of fabrics, so that I could feel it on my skin. When did you realise that you wanted to be an artist yourself? As a young child I was obsessed with Young Talent Time. Although I now love to write and play the piano, at heart I have always been a thwarted singer. What’s the most brilliant individual performance you have ever seen? A dead heat between Evgeny Kissin at Carnegie Hall, playing the Brahms D minor concerto like some sort of perfected AI; and Radu Lupu, sitting very still on a stage in Fort Worth, channelling late Beethoven and Brahms, like the wisest type of human. Name three performers you would like to work with? I’d love to witness Chopin’s pianism firsthand. And to collaborate with Fritz Wunderlich on Dichterliebe. And, if I dared, to play four hands with Martha Argerich. Do you have a favourite song? I would usually say Richard Strauss’s Morgen! but I’ve just been performing Mahler’s Ruckertlieder at the Bendigo Chamber Music Festival with the beautiful mezzo-soprano Ashlyn Timms, and so now I’m infatuated by Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen. And your favourite play or opera? Fragments of King Lear pop into my mind more than those of any other play, and show no sign of abating as I get older (Ripeness is all!). Almost any opera by Mozart, or Der Rosenkavalier (honorary Mozart). Who is your favourite writer – and your favourite composer? My most ecstatic reading experience was In Search of Lost Time, so I should say Proust, but I return more often to Middlemarch, always with renewed delight. Choosing a composer is more difficult, as if opting for Chopin means renouncing Schubert. But, at the moment, one of those two, or J.S. Bach. How do you regard the audience? Every audience is different, but, at the best, audiences amplify attention and create such a charged space that they become silent collaborators. What’s your favourite theatrical venue in Australia? I’m very sentimental about the Adelaide Festival Theatre because of the formative memories it holds, and what it represents about Don Dunstan’s vision: South Australia at its most enlightened. What do you look for in arts critics? Proper specialist knowledge rather than its simulation. A willingness to surrender to the work of art on its own terms. Ideally some writerly facility, but not the urge to preen, using the reviewed object as a prop. (I’m fully aware I haven’t always lived up to these ideals.) It’s a rare combination, but oh – when you find it! Being properly read, as a writer, is one of life’s great pleasures. Do you read your own reviews? Yes, to my peril/hubris/hurt feelings. Money aside, what makes being an artist difficult – or wonderful – in Australia? Nobody much cares: discouraging one day; freeing the next. What’s the single biggest thing governments could do for artists? Support a universal basic income. What advice would you give an aspiring artist? Only do it if you need to. Then I would read them Sharon Olds’s poem ‘Easel’, which finishes with ‘what could I have said: nothing will stop me’. What’s the best advice you have ever received? Learn to say no (implementing this remains a work in progress). What’s your next project or performance? My next performance will be ‘Dancing with Birds’ with our wonderful faculty at the Elder Conservatorium of Music, as part of the Adelaide Festival. And I’m working on a novel, The Children’s Zoo.

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