Musicians like to play. Some play instruments, others play pieces, and a few, somehow, go deeper. They play ‘the music’, ideally sidelining the instrument or documentation, to connect with their audience person-to-person, even ear-to-ear. Chamber music is probably the most intimate of music’s genres. It is fundamentally about unmediated musical relationships, ‘the music’, presented within the eponymous ‘chamber’. With chamber music at its best, the listening of the audience can become so palpable that it is almost loud. You start to feel guilty even at the sound of your own breathing. There were such moments at this year’s Australian Festival of Chamber Music in Townsville.

This Festival’s greatest name was undoubtedly the Polish-born pianist, Piotr Anderszewski. Brought out from Europe under a ‘super star’ scheme of the Queensland Government, Anderszewski well justified the taxpayer’s outlay. Whether playing a Mozart concerto (in A, K414), Bach suites (English, Nos 3 and 6), Schumann variations (the ‘Ghost’) or Szymanowski’s poetic Metopes, he placed his instrument, and even the compositions themselves, in deep service to ‘the music’. In the process, he sometimes pushed beyond the boundary of interpretation into revelation – of new musical vistas and meanings – in works we may have heard dozens of times before, but never before quite like this.