When Sydney Festival Director Olivia Ansell invited Madeleine Easton to explore the musical impact of JS Bach under the themes of “birth, death and destiny”, the Bach Akademie Australia Artistic Director looked to the sky where she was drawn to Venus, the Morning Star.

Struck by the idea that the planet that Bach saw each night was the same one we see centuries later in Australia – and which our First Nations people have been seeing for 60,000 years – Easton had the seeds of a beautifully put together and intelligent program to follow up last year’s weeklong Bach festival within a festival.

Factor in that music is nothing without mathematics and that Bach used the Fibonacci Sequence in some compositions, notably the Goldberg Variations – the same sequence that occurs in nature and the cosmos – and that he championed equal temperament, as had Galileo’s father Vincenzo Galilei 140 years before him, and some more pieces fell into place.

Madeleine Easton and Bach Akademie Australia: Bach Birth and Destiny. Photo © Wendell Teodoro

This latest concert was based on the BAA’s performance in September last year under the title Bach:...