For those who haven’t been paying attention for the past 24 years, Huntington Estate is a winery just a few clicks outside of Mudgee in rural NSW, where an annual music festival is held in the capacious barrel room. For the past few years, it’s been a home away from home for chamber music organisation Musica Viva.

British pianist Freddy Kempf opened the festival with a warhorse of the piano repertoire, Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition. Kempf tore into the opening promenade at breakneck speed, as though the viewer has leapt out of his troika, snow clinging to his fur lapels, and rushes toward painting No 1, Gnomus. Pictures is often approached as a suite with independent movements, but Kempf conceived of it as one gradually escalating dramatic episode. It was an unusually serious, intense, and very idiosyncratic, reading of the work, which would surprise those used to more variety. Not even the Ballet of the Unhatched Chicks deserved a moment of levity. Nonetheless, one got a sense Kempf was delving deeper here towards the heart of the piece as an essay...