A two-note mystery, a composer with Asperger's, and a bassoon that learned to sound like the Middle East, all in one Jakarta evening
Two folk tunes, born a thousand kilometers apart, turn out to be nearly identical  off by exactly two notes. That coincidence just became a piece of chamber music, and it premiered in Jakarta four days after Austria's new ambassador landed in the country.

At a Glance

• Date: Thursday, June 25, 2026
• Host: Austrian Embassy, Jakarta
• New envoy: H.E. Alexander Rieger, arrived in Indonesia 2 days before the concert
• Ensemble: violin, bassoon, and piano trio three musicians, three countries of training

What Happened at the Austrian Embassy Concert in Jakarta?

On Thursday, June 25, 2026, the Austrian Embassy in Jakarta held a welcome concert for H.E. Alexander Rieger and Mme. Maria Rieger, who had touched down in the city only two days earlier as Ambassador Designate. The evening's centerpiece was a brand-new commission from the Austrian Foreign Ministry: composer and pianist Ananda Sukarlan's piece "The Curious Coincidence of a Tune Appearance in Austria & Scotland In The Night-Time," written specifically to mark Austrian-Indonesian friendship.

What Makes "The Curious Coincidence" So Special ?

The title nods to Mark Haddon's novel "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time." Ananda, who has Asperger's Syndrome himself, built the piece around a real musical puzzle: Austria's folk tune "Ach du lieber Augustin!" and Scotland's "Did You Ever See a Lassie?" are the same melody, separated by just two extra notes in the Scottish version. Those two notes became the motif driving the entire trio, scored for violin, bassoon, and piano.

Who Performed at the Concert?

The bassoon part went to Christoph Karl Wichert, an Austrian musician now with the Singapore Symphony Orchestra. On violin was Nathanael Hertanto, born in Makassar and now playing with an orchestra in Vienna. Ananda called the lineup "Austrindonesia"  an Austrian based in Singapore, an Indonesian based in Vienna, and himself, a frequent visitor to Austria who knows its composers personally.

"I wanted my music to solve a mystery too  why the same tune shows up in two different countries," Ananda said of the piece's origin.

Before the premiere, the program traced Austrian music from the era of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791) through jazz and modernism: Mozart's aria "Der Schauspieldirektor," Franz Schubert's "Lachen und Weinen," Friedrich Gulda's jazz set "Play Piano, Play," and dodecaphonic works by Anton Webern and Nancy Van de Vate.

Why Does Nancy van de Vate Matter to Indonesia?

Van de Vate (1930–2023) was born in New Jersey but became an Austrian citizen in the 1980s. She wrote seven operas  most famously "All Quiet on the Western Front"  and founded the International League of Women Composers in the 1970s, at a time when she herself had published under the pseudonym William Huntley to avoid bias against women composers. She met Ananda backstage after his 1999 Vienna concert, later gifted him her piece "Fantasy Pieces," and after the 2002 Bali bombings composed "Lament for Bali," drawing on the Balinese and Javanese musical systems that had shaped her own work.

Two young Indonesian vocalists also took the stage: baritone Jonathan Jedine Santoso, now studying at the National University of Singapore, and soprano Shelomita Amory, who hopes to apply to a university in Austria next year. Alongside Schubert and Hugo Wolf, they sang Ananda's settings of poems by Darmawan Sepriyossa and Ikhsan Risfandi, closing with Sapardi Djoko Damono's "Dalam Doaku." In "Lailatul Qadar," Wichert's bassoon imitated a zurna, a Middle Eastern reed instrument, using Arabic scales.

Wichert also performed "Fibonacci Haiku" (2004) by Austrian composer Werner Schulze, born 1952. Hertanto played Ananda's solo violin work "Fantasy on Wayah Surup," the same piece that won him a spot in the G20 Orchestra in 2022. He studies under Prof. Teodora Sorokow in Vienna and has already performed with the Vienna Symphony Orchestra, Berlin Symphony Orchestra, and Salzburg Philharmonic.