Ulrike Klein’s Ngeringa Arts Cultural Centre: harmony with nature

A new venue outside Adelaide aims to connect chamber music with the land.

Portrait of businesswoman Ulrike Klein and her new Ngeringa Cultural Centre which includes a venue for chamber music.

Most classical music experiences are ones in which we attempt to isolate ourselves from the outside world. We arrive at the concert hall, somewhere in a busy city, and begin a gradual process of shedding mundane distractions and quietening and preparing our ­senses. The auditorium doors softly but firmly close and we’re hermetically sealed in the chamber, ready for the music to begin.

How very different is the experience of music not in the city but in the bush. The senses are not narrowly focused but somehow awakened. Like good food at a picnic, music often sounds better when consumed amid nature.

These are exactly the two elements that Ulrike Klein wants to bring together at her new Ngeringa Arts Cultural Centre, which opens this weekend just outside Adelaide. The businesswoman and philanthropist has built a 200-seat auditorium, optimally designed for chamber music, set at the summit of Mount Barker.

Klein, a horticulturalist by training, founded with her former husband Jurgen Klein the Jur­lique range of cosmetics, whose biodynamically grown plant ingredients are claimed to capture the “life force of the land”.

Klein describes music as possessing a similar life-force: like nature, music is never static.

“Nature teaches us what life actually is … music is very similar,” says Klein.

“I am attracted to musicians who are right out there and play in a very daring way. You are in the moment, you sit on the edge of your seat. Even if you have heard a quartet 50 times, it’s as if you hear it for the first time, it’s like being in the landscape and having the sun coming through the clouds. That is something which resonates deeply with me.”

Klein had formerly hosted chamber concerts on the site, in a seminar room that was “acoustically OK”, but not of the standard she felt the musicians deserved. While the new venue was under construction, her Ngeringa Arts chamber music series — it hosts a program of 10 concerts a year — was held at the nearby Mount Barker Waldorf School.

She says she had three specifications for Adelaide architect Anton Johnson: that the venue have the optimum acoustic for chamber music; that the building not be a white elephant in the landscape but allow enjoyment of the natural environment; and, finally, given the growing popularity of the concert series, that the auditorium be expanded from 150 seats, as originally planned, to 200.

“Having very fine artists, you want to be able to hear them,” says Klein. “The idea was to build a new concert hall: let’s do it properly and make sure we have an acoustic which meets the quality of the musicians we have here.”

Designed with acoustic consultant Cameron Hough from Arup, the new venue is hexagon shaped with a domed ceiling, and a 4m window giving views of Mount Barker summit. While the first public performances are not until this weekend, the auditorium is said to have an enveloping sound, providing an intimate atmosphere for chamber music recitals.

Born during the war years, Klein grew up in the German countryside and was a musical child — she played the violin — although her father resisted any ambitions she may have had to be an artist. “I played in an orchestra but never to a standard that I could satisfy myself,” she says.

She and her husband Jurgen had started a business in Germany using natural plant essences for skincare and wellbeing. They and their four children moved to the Adelaide Hills in 1983 and founded Jurlique in 1985. In 2002 the company was sold to Kerry Packer, and sold again in 2011 to a Japanese company for $335 million.

“The beginnings of Jurlique were fairly difficult, but as soon as I realised that we were becoming successful, I wanted to give back to the community by giving concerts,” Klein says. “We had concerts first at the factory and here at the Ngeringa property. It was something which was my way of giving back into the community. At the time, I realised a lot of money goes into sport, which is important, but not as much money is given to culture. I wanted to make a difference.”

Klein says she subsidises the concerts — single tickets are $40 — because she wants the tickets to be affordable and because she wants to pay the musicians a decent fee. She has supported musicians in other ways, too. In recent years she has helped purchase — with support from public fundraising — three 18th-century Italian string instruments by master luthier Guadagnini. A fourth was bought by Maria Myers, and all are on loan to the members of the Australian String Quartet.

There are small chamber music ventures in other picturesque locations, such as the Huntington Estate Music Festival in Mudgee, NSW, programmed by Musica Viva, and the ASQ’s Dunkeld Festival of Music supported by Allan and Maria Myers. Few sites have venues built specifically for music, but the Four Winds Festival at Bermagui on the NSW south coast, founded by the late Neilma Gantner, has an open-air amphitheatre and a new Windsong Pavilion auditorium, made for chamber music performances.

The Ngeringa Arts Cultural Centre will be inaugurated on Sunday by the ASQ, Marshall McGuire on harp, violinists Yuhki Mayne and Harry Bennetts, and pianist Kristian Chong. Klein has commissioned a new string quartet from Matthew Hindson for the occasion.

“Chamber music is music in a chamber,” Klein says. “Musicians love that intimacy with the audience, the audience loves to be close up. It’s really trying to bring back that original idea of chamber music … The hall itself is like a musical instrument which will make instruments and voices sing really beautifully.”

Klein is excited to at last see her plans come to fruition, where fine music can be appreciated in a wonderful natural setting: an experience she describes as “so beautiful and full of harmony”.

@matthewwestwood