For people who love chamber music, it isn’t a passing fancy, composer Carl Vine told Limelight at the end of his almost 20-year tenure as Artistic Director of the world’s largest chamber music organisation. “It becomes a life-long dedication,” he says.

The Beaux Arts Trio

Musica Viva Australia, which began with a concert in Sydney led by violist, inventor and World War II refugee Richard Goldner, turns 75 this year. “It’s incalculable the change that Richard Goldner brought about in our cultural fabric since 1945,” the organisation’s new Artistic Director Paul Kildea says. “I remember very well Musica Viva from my adolescence in Canberra, and student days in Melbourne, so it’s always been there and part of my life – and that’s back to the mid 80s.”

Indeed, it is the decades long (if not life-long) dedication of musicians and administrators beginning with Richard Goldner that has kept alive the organisation which has brought music to generations of children and adults.

Goldner started Musica Viva as an ensemble – which he established in honour of his teacher Simon Pullman, who was killed, along with his orchestra,...