High Surf - An Excerpt

The whole genesis of surfing was somewhere between a performing art and a sport. Surfing’s always had that for me.

It’s not a problem most classical violinists face. But for Richard Tognetti, the prospect of salt water dripping from his nose during a performance is a very real concern. Especially when he has a $10 million Giuseppe Guarneri del Gesu violin, built in 1743, resting under his chin.

‘It’s happened during rehearsal.’ admits Tognetti, ‘but not during a concert.’ The saline nasal drip was a result of his long hours immersed in the ocean chasing waves.

The rare violin, known as the Carrodus, was recently purchased by an anonymous Australian benefactor and made available to Tognetti, creative director of the world-renowned Australian Chamber Orchestra. That is the kind of devotion the ACO inspires in its fans.

It would surprise many in the classical music world to know that Tognetti has had things other than rare antique violins occupying his attention lately.

‘I couldn’t have done a concert yesterday because I’d surfed for two or three hours,’ says Richard. ‘It’s been a great month of surf in Sydney.’

A phenomenal run of swell has been playing havoc with Richard’s schedule. Quick bolts south to Sandon Point, near Wollongong, have interrupted practice sessions.

‘I think it’s a damn blessing to have both music and surfing in my life,’ says Richard. ‘It’s like the Ancient Greeks: body and mind’

Richard says these twin pursuits, and the release surfing provides from the focused and disciplined world of classical music, have had great benefits. ‘It’s the ultimate Zen experience. I used to think I’d solve my problems by going surfing, but it’s better than that. You can’t even consider them. You just get lost in a dream. It’s a brilliant release.’

Not too many surfers get lured away from the wave riding lifestyle by the delights of classical music, but Richard is one such rare creature. He grew up in Wollongong on the beach and naturally followed his older brother into the surf at Puckey’s, North Wollongong. ‘There was a gang of groms, I wasn’t part of it but my brother was. He was always a terrific surfer.’

What does he remember from those early forays into the waves? ‘Sitting out the back and trying to catch a wave and finally catching one and being overwhelmed by it,’ he recalls. But when he was eleven, Richard moved north to study violin at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, and surfing took a back seat.

‘Then I didn’t surf for years and years until I was seventeen. I found it too hard to do intermittently,’ says Richard. Eventually the pull of the Bondi beach breaks proved too much for the city-bound music student. ‘I can remember the gradual improvement that comes with being an intermittent surfer. It’s the hardest thing I’ve done,’ he says. What kept him persevering? ‘Just the common thread of that thrill, being lost in it,’he says. ‘Just getting pummelled is so important, I reckon. If you get pummelled once it’s no good, but if you get pummelled over and over you get used to it.’

Regular trips to southern Western Australia, and opportunities to combine touring and surfing fed the habit. ‘When we tour regional areas – places like Shell Harbour – surfing there and doing a concert in Kiama that night, that’s a pretty nice thing to do.

But while Richard’s surfing progress may have been gradual, his musical career surged from one peak to another. He trained under esteemed teachers such as Alice Waten and William Primrose at the Sydney Conservatorium, and Igor Ozim at the Berne Conservatory in Switzerland, where he was awarded the prestigious Tschumi Prize as the top graduate soloist in 1989. That some year he became artistic director of the Australian Chamber Orchestra, when he was just twenty four. His was a controversial appointment, particularly because of his youth, but his bold adventurous leadership of the ACO over the last seventeen years has earned it an international reputation for expanding the boundaries of classical music. Now over forty, Richard is widely regarded as one of the great classical violinists in the world today, and was made a National Living Treasure in 1999.

Richard is a very physical violinist, conducting as he plays, crouching and extending with the peaks and troughs of the music, riding the sound waves. He walks on stage with the surfer’s easy gait, cracks jokes, hitches up is pants or gazes about casually when not actually playing. In another time or place, the stuffy world of classical music might have found his informality too much. But his talent redeems all.

A review in the London Telegraph 2006 is typical of the kind of praise that the ACO and Tognetti earn: ‘This concert was that rare thing, a beautifully shaped whole in which all the parts were absolutely in tune with each other and with the space. . .The orchestra played like angels throughout, with springing rhythmic grace and impeccable style . . . (Richard Tognetti) is on of the most characterful, incisive and impassioned violinists to be heard today.’ Or this, from The Times in London: ‘The Australian Chamber Orchestra is a ticket to musical bliss.’

These days, it is the idea of combining his surfing and his music that has Richard excited. He recently collaborated with Tom Carroll and Ross Clarke-Jones to produce a soundtrack to the big wave surfing video Horrorscopes, which documents a dangerous mission to surf a huge offshore reef near the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa.

Working with composer Michael Yezerski, and ex-Midnight Oil guitarist Jim Moginie, Richard’s haunting violin provides a suitably eerie soundscape for the images of the cold, lonely, shark-infested waters.

‘That was just so fortunate,’ says Tom Carroll, who was won over to the power of classical music as a surfing soundtrack. ‘It goes hand in hand with tow-in and big waves, the romantic side of it and the reality. The awesome power of the ocean, it’s best married with music with real full on, unadulterated emotion.’

Richard also performed on the recent album Look by well-known surfing musician Pico, who recorded the album in a mobile studio while on a surfing road trip down the east coast of Australia.

Close followers of professional surfing may even recall an appearance by Tognetti at the Rip Curl Pro at Bells Beach in 1993. Close friend and ex-pro surfer Derek Hynd convinced Richard to play electric violin as accompaniment to recordings of past Bells winners discussing the event – a kind of spoken –word classical-music performance art. Most of the surfing crowd didn’t quite know what to make of the experimental artform, but Richard remains excited by the synergy between surfing and music. In 2007, he’s staging a tour of regional surfing centres to take his music to a younger audience.

‘We’ve only just started,’ he says. ‘The whole genesis of surfing was somewhere between a performing art and a sport. Surfing’s always had that for me.’

He imagines playing live at the beach to accompany a surfing performance-almost like an aquatic ballet. ‘I’d love it. I’ve always dreamt of it. It’s one of the most difficult things to do but one of the most appealing and one of the most satisfying.’

At the same time, he stresses, he’s not on any mission to convert the surfing world to the virtues of classical music. ‘I’m not into the tribal thing of surfing. I’m not much of a missionary. It’s always refreshing when people talk about their musical experiences and they happen to be surfers. It was edifying when Tom Carroll started coming to the concerts and was blown away by the experience of sitting in a concert hall. The only difference when you’re at classical music concerts, you are expected to just shut up and listen. For some that can be quite frustrating, but it can also be powerful, when you are exposed to yourself like that.’

There have been times when he’s played violin spontaneously after a good day of waves and made a profound impression on his surfing friends who aren’t normally exposed to classical music. ‘I remember playing for a group of friends in WA. I’d be surfing at the Farm… and instead of losing the energy, by the time I played, I was fuelled by the experience of surfing. And I played in the Maldives once to one of the surf guides there. He’d never heard a violin before. I started playing a few notes and he burst into tears. Those kinds of things are pretty powerful.’

Richard reckons his own musical tastes are broad and he’d like to see a wider definition of surf music and a broader understanding of the kind of soundtracks that can best complement the beauty and drama of surfing. He cites the example of Pink Floyd’s ambient soundtrack to ‘70’s surf movie Crystal Voyager as an early influence in his understanding of how surfing and music can work together. ‘I can listen to thrash metal if it’s well played but I don’t see the marriage. The soundtrack in my head (to surfing) isn’t thrash metal,’ he says. He once used footage of the late Tahitian surfer Malik Joyeux (who drowned at Pipeline, Hawaii, in 2005) on a huge wave at Teahupo'o, in Tahiti, and set it to a Beethoven symphony, to see how it worked. ‘I thought that was overwhelming,’ he says.

Tognetti has been seen as something of a maverick in the classical music world, but has won over even his most ardent critics, breaking down barriers between musical genres and taking classical music to new audiences. A recent documentary on a year in the life of the ACO was appropriately titled Musical Renegades. ‘We feel Richard and the ACO are “renegades” from the stale, closed-off world that is sometimes associated with classical music and musicians,’ says the film director, Tim Slade. We took the word renegade in its more everyday usage not as a “defector”, as such, from a cause, but a breakaway who changes the status quo.’

Among his many groundbreaking collaborations and projects, Richard has also worked with former Midnight Oil singer (now Labor MP) Peter Garrett and cartoonist Michael Leunig in the performance and recording of Leunig’s Carnival of the Animals. He also worked on Peter Weir’s 2003 film Master and Commander - as composer, soundtrack soloist and violin tutor to Russell Crowe.

Does he think his taste for the adventurous and unusual in his musical career is influenced by his surfing? ‘That’s a very difficult question to answer. Let’s say, yes. A Wollongong surfer doing what I do?’ He leaves the question hanging ponderously.

It has been a remarkable journey for a surfer from Wollongong and Richard’s in no doubt surfing has played a large part in fuelling that journey. ‘As Terry Fitzgerald once said, it’s good to outlast the bastards. Coming from Wollongong, so many people are either mulled out or they’ve hit the plonk or they’ve turned to fat,’ says Richard, ‘but those who have kept surfing have kept living.’

Tim Baker
High Surf
Published by Harper Collins