Beethoven, burglary and the Baroque form the cornerstones of next year’s imaginative programme.

In the introduction to the Australian Chamber Orchestra’s new season brochure, Richard Tognetti writes that his most triumphant musical experience was not as a player (of 1,160 works to date and counting) but as a listener. He goes on to recall a student experience his first time in Europe at a time when he was “alone, free, headstrong, full of Romantic ideals”. Landing from Australia at Frankfurt airport he was headed for Davos in Switzerland. “It was 7°C and foggy,” he reminisces . “I took a train through the miserable Rhein-Main-Gebiet up into Zürich where I changed trains to a mountain village high up in the Graubünden region of Switzerland. As the geography rose, so did my spirits. For the duration of the trip I was listening over and over to Beethoven’s Op. 131 Quartet in an arrangement for strings by Dmitri Mitropoulos, on an old Walkman.” At the same time he was reading Thomas Mann’s Der Zauberberg without realizing that the place he was headed was the very ‘Magic Mountain’ where the...