Now in its third year, the Festival is a celebration of all things Tasmanian – as well as the music there is outstanding food and wine, beautiful spring gardens and a great variety of heritage venues, including churches, barns, and the Georgian magnificence of Clarendon House. Although the festival only runs from Friday evening through to lunch on Sunday, I came home exhausted from the sheer intensity of listening to such a rich and diverse selection of musical offerings.

The Orava Quartet: Daniel Kowalik, David Dalseno, Karol Kowalik and Thomas Chawner. Photo © Dylan Evans Photography

The festival opened and closed with the Orava Quartet. On opening night they had to do battle with the cold and a challenging acoustic to perform two of the great masterworks of the quartet repertoire: Beethoven’s Serioso Quartet, and Schubert’s Death and the Maiden. Despite an intermittent lack of cohesion – which I put down to the acoustic – both performances were enjoyable. The passage in the first movement of the Beethoven, where the viola plays a towering C-string freakout, is amongst the finest I have heard: there seems to be no limit to the amount of sound...