Dear readers, tonight with us is a concert violinist from Sydney, Australia. She’s here to speak to us about getting the solo performance of a life time — and her relationship with the long-dead composer who wrote it.

Tell us a little about where you grew up. What was it like there?

Out west, near Parramatta. Summers so hot the footpath goes soft and the cicadas drown out the traffic. People in the eastern suburbs think anything past Strathfield is the outback, and in January they have a point.

Both my parents were musicians – Mum on violin, Dad on cello – and Dad later ran a small music school, so there were always students in the front room murdering scales. I thought every family kept a metronome on the kitchen bench.

Now I live in a Victorian terrace in Stanmore, with crooked floors and pipes that groan whenever the neighbour flushes. I bought it at twenty-six because I thought owning a house would make me an adult. Mostly it made me chase the mortgage.

Did you have any favourite toys as a child? Any cherished memories?

I don’t remember learning the violin, any more than I remember learning to talk. Mum put one in my hands before I could read music: her old student instrument, which she’d outgrown years before and kept, just in case. It had a scratch on the back and a peg that slipped when it was humid. I took it everywhere, including, once, the beach. I guess for my parents that was normal.

When I was eight, Dad arranged a folk song for the two of us. Him at the piano, me on that violin. I botched the bridge five times in a row, and every time he said, Again, Lily, from the top, you’ll get it, as if there was no question.

Mum got sick when I was twelve. After she died the house went quiet, Dad crawled into himself, we stopped talking about anything that mattered. Music was the only language we had left in common, and some years we barely managed that. He died when I was twenty-two.

What do you do now?

I play second violin with the Belmont Theatre Orchestra in Surry Hills. Third desk, inner chair, which is orchestra-speak for “you’d never pick me out of a line-up”. Four years now. We show up, we play, we go home. Passion is for soloists, and people without a mortgage.

The Belmont is the best part. It was built in 1897 by someone with money and an over-compensation complex: gilt, burgundy velvet, cherubs across the ceiling. It hasn’t staged a play in decades, but there are still brass stars on the dressing-room doors and a fly gallery full of ropes nobody’s touched since the seventies.

I auditioned for a principal chair once. It didn’t go my way, and afterwards I got very good at telling myself reliable was enough. Then our conductor handed me a solo, which freaked me out, but set strange things in motion.

What can you tell us about your latest adventure?

The Ashworth Foundation – old money, big in Sydney classical music – was holding an anniversary gala, and Steinberg, our conductor, gave me the violin solo in the Ashworth Variations. You know it even if you think you don’t: films, ads, half the weddings in the country. It always goes to the concertmaster. He gave it to the third desk, and told me not to thank him yet.

So I stayed late at the Belmont to practise. Alone, in a very old building with a ghost story attached.

The piano started playing by itself. Then it played the Variations, but wrong. Different notes. Better ones. That led me to Viktor Novák, a Hungarian pianist who vanished from the Belmont in 1934 and, as it turns out, never left.

I can’t say more without someone’s lawyer calling. But if you’ve ever hummed that melody at a wedding, you were humming a dead man’s music, and the name on it isn’t his.

Continue reading “Lily Brennan (of The Stolen Sonata, by Isla Blackwood)” →