An intimate evening with special energy

Live at Yours is back with another fantastic concert, this time featuring two superstars of Aussie music, who will strip away the grandeur of concert halls to offer something far more precious: proximity to the sublime.

Richard Tognetti, the visionary force behind the Australian Chamber Orchestra, will appear alongside pianist Konstantin Shamray for Live at Yours.

Their collaboration promises to transform intimate venues across Sydney, Melbourne and Castlemaine into chambers of musical alchemy.

“It’s our job to bring the listener in through our portal – a numinous moment when, hopefully, we can make time stand still,” Tognetti reflected. His words captured the essence of Live at Yours, creating connections that feel less like observation and more like communion.

Tognetti and Shamray will be performing at Sydney’s Great Synagogue and Melbourne’s Toorak Shule in July.

Despite not often playing “good old-fashioned recitals in a duo”, Tognetti told The AJN that the concert pares back the musical conversation to “its most essential meeting between two souls”.

“Playing a concert in a place where the walls have absorbed the prayers of countless generations, where the air is thick with meaning, imbues the music with a very special energy,” he said.

Shamray agreed saying he loves playing at both The Great Synagogue and Toorak Shule. “There’s a special atmosphere rich with history and an uplifting acoustic,” he said. “The chemistry with Richard is very open and direct.”

The program itself reads like a love letter to the classical canon: Bach’s architectural precision in his Violin Sonata fugue, Schubert’s dreamlike Fantasie in C Major, and the haunting beauty of Ravel’s Kaddish.

The evening crescendos with Brahms’ passionate First Violin Sonata, while Bach’s Prelude, filtered through Rachmaninov’s romantic lens, adds layers of interpretive depth.

Tognetti will play his legendary 1743 Guarneri del Gesù – an instrument once caressed by Paganini’s fingers – while Shamray, the only pianist in Sydney International Piano Competition history to claim both First Prize and People’s Choice, approaches each key with what observers describe as “fearless command and joyous curiosity”.

Live at Yours emerged from the chrysalis of COVID lockdowns, when Ukrainian Australian conductor Vladimir Fanshil and his soprano wife Eleanor Lyons began hosting concerts in homes for audiences of 20.

“We believed that music should always be live,” Fanshil explains, and from this simple conviction grew a movement that has now presented 250 concerts across five years in spaces ranging from coffee roasteries to heritage buildings.

The format deliberately abandons concert hall formality for something more human: spontaneous artist insights, audience questions, and those unscripted moments where music becomes conversation.

It’s concert-going that feels closer to visiting friends who happen to be world-class musicians – if your friends could make a Guarneri sing with centuries of accumulated wisdom.

Live at The Great is on July 1-2, 7pm. For tickets, visit tognettishamray.eventbrite.com.au 
Live at Toorak Shule is on July 3, 7pm. For tickets, visit tognettitoorak.eventbrite.com.au