ONE of Australia’s most innovative musicians working on the European stage is heading for Canberra next month.

“My idea is to bring classical music out of the concert hall,” violist Tahlia Petrosian tells me by phone from Germany, fairly brimming with excitement as she outlines her plans.

She’ll be here for a week-long residency during which she will hold workshops for ANU string performance students and the CSO Kingsland program participants, present the CSO Llewellyn Series Concert Talks on August 16 and 17 and play in a chamber concert performance with the ANU Chamber Orchestra, conducted by Canberra’s top violist, Tor Frømyhr.

Known in Europe as the founding director of the Klassik Underground club series, which has redefined the boundaries of classical music performance, she was born in Sydney of Armenian and Chinese parentage but is now based in Leipzig, where she plays with the Gewandhaus Orchestra.

Serendipitously, Gewandhaus, to which she has belonged since 2012, is the very same orchestra where ANU School of Music flute senior lecturer Sally Walker performed from 2003 to 2005, and although the two have never met, it is Walker who was behind the initiative in bringing Petrosian to Canberra.

“Our time in the orchestra did not overlap,” she says, but she is at last meeting Walker on stage to perform as part of the festival Illuminate Adelaide, finishing on July 31. Then they’ll head for Canberra.

Petrosian’s background as a musician is close to unique.

When young she was involved in the Sydney Youth Orchestra and the Australian World Orchestra, but after school she did an arts-law degree at UNSW, while playing a lot of chamber music.

After winning multiple university prizes, she moved to Berlin to study viola with Tabea Zimmermann and Wilfried Strehle, also studying law at nearby Humboldt University. 

Her resulting academic work was published in the “Australian Journal of International Law”. So after being headhunted, she returned to Sydney and worked for a legal firm, but soon decided to go back to Germany to pursue music professionally.

But, she tells me, there are parallels between the law and performing. Having been an advocate in mock trials where she was obliged to present an argument, for instance, was rather performing, though in a trial you’re presenting yourself, but in musical performance you’re presenting someone else’s work.

“The artistic side is more personal and less steeped in intellectual rigour, but I’m not saying it’s not intellectual.” She says, “It’s just that the legal scene is more objective.”

But there have been many other strings to her bow and in 2019, Petrosian developed music projects for the Tate Modern and the BBC and was the producer for “50 Years in a Day” concerts at Southbank. 

Her choice of instrument began at age 14 when there weren’t enough viola players for a Sydney concert, but she believes it has given her the opportunity of a richer music experience.

“Being in the middle of the action is super-interesting,” she says, “the role of the viola is less defined and more nebulous – Mozart and Beethoven played the viola.”

Klassik Underground had begun life in 2016 in an underground venue near the concert hall after she asked whether they’d like to do a club-style, after-show guest spot involving leading international artists. 

“It’s much more drawn from the classical canon… but in a context that is modern… the music is always classical,” she says, “but it’s more a conversation between the musicians and the audience, getting them to listen in a more personal way.”

The format sees classical music combined with other art forms, drawing on the club scene and sometimes mixing in theatre, so she has combined Shostakovich with live street art and classical music with a screening of the horror film “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari”.

“That’s the kind of thing we’re doing in Illuminate Adelaide, where there’ll be two different Klassik Underground shows,” she says.

In “Reverberating Rhythms” she leads an ensemble of flute, viola, harp, and four percussionists through a program of John Cage, Tōru Takemitsu and Sofia Gubaidulina, matched with visuals by Tim Gruchy. And in “Shifting Sounds”, she and Gewandhaus Orchestra members perform works by Igor Stravinsky, Béla Bartók and Iannis Xenakis to a video installation by VFX artist Joli Boardman on a wraparound LED screen.

“Modernity and traditional musical forms collide,” she says.

Tahlia Petrosian chamber concert, Larry Sitsky Recital Room, August 18.