WHEN piano player Sine Winther arrives soon to perform Alexander Scriabin’s “blue” concerto, it won’t be a homecoming, yet her Canberra connections are very strong. 

Winther is the daughter of another brilliant concert pianist, John Winther, director of the Canberra School of Music from 1980 to 1985, and she numbers among her siblings the Canberra-born violinist, Kristian and Thomas, a director of the Aarhus Conservatorium in Denmark.

Their father, who died in 2012, had left Canberra to become a professor at the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts, where he met Winther’s mother, yet another brilliant pianist. 

Winther has only vague recollections of having been here for a visit during her childhood. 

She’ll join Canberra Symphony Orchestra to perform the only Scriabin concerto, of which she says: “It’s got some tricky spots I would say, maybe on the same level as Grieg, but I wouldn’t call it fiendishly difficult. My hand can reach for the full octave, so technically it’s not all that hard.”

What would be fiendish for her would be Prokofiev’s Concerto No. 2, or of course Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No. 3, the one that nearly finished David Helfgott off in the movie “Shine.”

Piano Concerto in F-sharp minor, Op. 20 is part of a very unusual concert for, as we have reported before, the artistic director of the CSO Jessica Cottis is a self-identified synesthete, who responds to music in terms of colour.

With this in mind, the concert is titled “Electric Blue”. It also features Rimsky-Korsakov’s famously popular “Scheherazade” and two world premieres, “Bathed in Blue” from NZ composer Miriama Young and “Beyond the Ridge, the Ranges Far” by Harry Sdraulig, played by CSO principal cellist Patrick Suthers. 

She’s never performed in Canberra before and while most definitely an Australian citizen, she’s become a citizen of the world, too.

Born on Magnetic Island, she spent the first 21 years of her life in Brisbane.

“My dad was in his late 60s when I was born and he was around until I was about 16, then he moved back to Denmark,” she tells me.

She lived in Denmark as a child to meet the rest of the family, moved to Germany once or twice, moved to Australia in 2018 to study at the Australian National Academy of Music in Melbourne, where she performed piano trios with brother Kristian, but is now “absolutely based in Germany”.

She’s just finished her last master’s recital in Germany but when she returns, she’ll be continuing her studies at Hochschule [academy] für Musik und Darstellende Kunst in Stuttgart, where she says she’s found “a good professor for the kind of music I want to study”.

“Music has different voices and different textures, and as a performer you’re trying to create a three-dimensional aural space,” she says. 

“But for some people, it’s the acuteness of a colour perception that is prominent, they will see things in colour, we are talking about nuance.”

“Electric Blue”, Llewellyn Hall, April 26-27.