Getting intimate: Pinchgut wants you to lean forward in this ‘reckless’ move

Following last year’s critically acclaimed Messiah, which pared back Handel’s best-loved choral work to its authentic one-to-a-part origins, Pinchgut Opera’s Erin Helyard is doubling down on the deceptively simple concept of less being more.

That intimate Messiah drew widespread praise from Sydney audiences.

“I had so many emails,” says Helyard. “They used imagery like, ‘It was like looking at an old painting that had been restored’. Another person said it was like ‘one of those sea turtles that has been scraped of all the barnacles’.”

Now Pinchgut is again inviting audiences to lean forward with its opening concert for 2026, this time shifting from the choral to orchestral.

Bach & Telemann - Concertos and Sonatas is the first purely orchestral concert for the company and features the Orchestra of the Antipodes. The performance will be “historically scaled” with one musician per part as originally intended by the composers.

Helyard traces the origins of the repertoire to Leipzig’s Collegium Musicum, founded in 1702 by Telemann himself.

“It was this student club,” he says. “A sort of pub in Leipzig where you would go and young composers and musicians would try out their latest works and people would evaluate them. There’d be drinking and it was very convivial. All the works we’re doing in this program were written for that environment.”

In a large symphonic setting - epitomised in Sydney most recently with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra’s triumphant performances of Mahler’s vast Song of the Earth - audiences are encouraged to sit back and let the sound envelop them. But in this more intimate setting the dynamic shifts, with each musician becoming, in effect, a soloist as well as part of the wider ensemble and the audience is encouraged to “lean in”.

The setting also has a profound effect on the performers.

“It’s liberating not to have someone to blend with,” says Helyard. “You can play more. But it’s also more audacious - a little bit more risky. You can then make it your own solo. Whereas when you’re in a section, you have other things to do. You have to blend, you have to make sure that the whole section is working as one, whereas this, it’s a little bit more reckless.”

Helyard himself gave the ultimate “one-to-a-part” performance in Melbourne recently, playing Bach’s Goldberg Variations, not on piano as is often the modern way, but on harpsichord as the composer intended. One reviewer commented that he hadn’t before witnessed a Melbourne Recital Centre audience listen “so quietly for so long”.

“My ultimate goal as a human being is to encourage and to create an atmosphere where audiences are listening and appreciating this beautiful music more,” says Helyard. “And if one of those things is a quieter, more historically accurate sense of listening as well, then that’s amazing.”

Concertos & Sonatas, Bach and Telemann, City Recital Hall, March 28 and 29