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Two works by Shostakovich sandwiching Rhapsody in Blue made for an exhilerating concert from the Australian Chamber Orchestra in Melbourne

Energetic commitment from the ACO at the Barbican, with precision and edge from Alexander Melnikov and Jeroen Berwaerts in an evening of darkness and light.

Awe-inspiring performances of much loved classics in Sydney, yet the musical eyebrows have reasons to go (and stay) up. 

Iestyn Davies joins the Australian Chamber Orchestra for music by Bach and Pärt in a programme featuring distracting modern dance. 

Mahler's epic five-movement symphonic song cycle is performed by a chamber ensemble with mixed results.

A terrific collaboration between Russian pianist Polina Leschenko and the Australian Chamber Orchestra in music by Chopin and Mendelssohn.

Cheerful energy and exploding fireworks in the ACO's Sydney programme, if lacking in a little repose. 

The Australian Chamber Orchestra brings music from Indie rock stars and the Polish composers who inspired them, with superb contributions from Guildhall students.

Jennifer Peedom's 75-minute documentary about rivers suffers from a greyscale narration and greyscale musical elements. 

The Australian Chamber orchestra gives its first subscription concert in Sydney since the beginning of the year. 

Concert life returns to Sydney with a programme of Mendelssohn and Schoenberg by the Australian Chamber Orchestra.

To mark #Beethoven250, the Australian Chamber Orchestra plays his first three symphonies in concert. But can one eat three delicious desserts in one sitting? 

The expanded forces of the ACO take on two major nineteenth-century symphonic works by Dvorak and Brahms, prefaced by world and Australian premieres of pieces by Andrew Ford and Andrew Norman

Richard Tognetti’s absorbing programme mixed Bach’s Goldberg Variations with Stravinsky and Adès, played impressively and with characteristic exuberance and finesse by the Australian Chamber Orchestra.

This concert in the ACO's “Celebrating Mozart” season included two symphonies in G minor – by Haydn and Mozart – to bookend the evening. 

The pictures win out as Bill Henson's powerful, complex and mysterious images take on the ACO's music, ranging from REM to Pēteris Vasks.

For their 2019 season-opener, Tognetti and the ACO collaborate with the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir to give a meditative, quasi-religious program centred on Bach and Pärt.

A pair of masterpieces in the Australian Chamber Orchestra's latest programme, in typically thought-provoking interpretations. 

Mozart's final three symphonies make for a brilliant opening to the Australian Chamber Orchestra's London residency. 

The title of the latest programme by the Australian Chamber Orchestra is simply: Goldberg Variations. While Bernard Labadie’s ingenious arrangement of JS Bach’s Goldberg Variations for string orchestra takes up all of the second half of the programme, the first half was no less interesting.

Bracing and emotionally direct performances from the Australian Chamber Orchestra and Nicole Car, in a carefully-planned programme.

In their Sydney season-opener, the ACO with guest players from ANAM deliver a thoroughly satisfying account of two 19th-century standards and introduce two new works to Australian audiences.

Emmanuel Pahud shows his fluting chops in a program accompanied by the popular and celebrated Australian Chamber Orchestra.

Four years ago, the ACO mounted The Reef. Mountain is clearly its successor: another film project involving scenes of nature peopled by extreme-sports enthusiasts, screened while an eclectic soundtrack is played live by the orchestra.

One of the reasons why the programmes of the Australian Chamber Orchestra are both challenging and inspiring is because of the ensemble’s always interesting and thought-provoking approach to repertoire.

Interleaving Bach violin concertos with Haydn symphonies, the ACO give an energetic performance in the Sydney Opera House, with highlight solos from Richard Tognetti and Helena Rathbone.

With utter technical mastery, the ACO extract every emotion from a concert that gets progressively darker as the evening proceeds. 

Richard Tognetti brings Baroque masterworks to Melbourne along with the world premiere of Kats-Chernin's new work for strings, Singing Trees.

In a relatively traditional programme, the Australian Chamber Orchestra reach the heights thanks to soloist Slava Grigoryan (on guitar), and a scintillating performance of Beethoven's Symphony no. 7.

Julia Lezhneva partners with Richard Tognetti and the ACO to deliver a thrilling program of Baroque arias, in which her vocal agility and expressivity are on full display.

Richard Tognetti (violin) and Polina Leschenko (piano) display an intensely concentrated, yet good-humoured rapport in Sydney. 

Arrangements aplenty as the Australian Chamber Orchestra take on Bach's Art of Fugue and Beethoven's Op.130, with Richard Tognetti the accomplished soloists in Mozart's Violin Concerto no. 5.

It takes artistic courage to devote almost a whole concert to music associated with cinema, but then Richard Tognetti, the artistic director and concert master of the Australian Chamber Orchestra, never lacked creative thinking or musical audacity. 

Combining instruments and performing practices old and new, Richard Tognetti and the Australian Chamber Orchestra render Mozart symphonies with panache.

Richard Tognetti and Christopher Moore exhibit excellent partnership in Mozart's Sinfonia Concertante, while a performance of Brahms' Third Symphony by the expanded forces of the Australian Chamber Orchestra provides much excitement and colour, but little sense of architectonic coherence.

The Gallipoli landings are etched indelibly into the Australian psyche. The Australian Chamber Orchestra offers an exploration of the campaigns which is enthralling and frustrating by turns. 

Effervescent Haydn, elegant Mozart, enigmatic Greenwood and exhilarating Tchaikovsky from the ACO in Dublin.

Beyond what size does a chamber orchestra just become an orchestra? With 60 musicians involved in their Mahler 4 and Sibelius 6 program, the ACO was certainly stretching anyone’s definition of ‘chamber’.

Marketed under the tagline: “42,000 years of music – 213 works – 1 performance”, Timeline is a hyper-ambitious production. At times history lesson, at times creative mash-up, it was both a highly stimulating and a frustrating experience, with outstanding performances from the instrumentalists and singers.

One of the pleasures of live music-making is seeing as well as hearing: one gets a sense of a performance as a multi-layered communicative act rather than solely as a sequence of beautiful sounds. In Saturday evening’s ACO concert with the extraordinary cellist Giovanni Sollima as soloist, the visual dimension contributed more than usual to the effect of the whole. 

The Australian Chamber Orchestra is undoubtedly one of the nation’s strongest classical music “brands”, although trying to pin down the forces that make up this protean ensemble is difficult.

When one sees the word “Erotica” in connection with classical music, one is usually safe in assuming that it’s a misprint in the title of Beethoven’s Third Symphony. And yet, at the Australian Chamber Orchestra’s concert on Saturday, it was no Freudian slip: Erwin Schulhoff’s Sonata Erotica, which the composer suggestively marked “nur für Herren” (for men only), was on the program.

For many reasons, the ACO’s most recent show The Reef was an artistic experience like no other in all my years of concert-going. It is difficult even categorising the event: an orchestral concert with accompanying video footage? A film with live soundtrack? Neither does full justice to the nature of the project.

Spot the odd one out: a symphony by Haydn, another by Mozart, a violin concerto by Mozart, and Electric Preludes by Brett Dean (2012). The bill of fare offered by the Australian Chamber Orchestra on Sunday cannot be called typical for them, since their programs evade any easy categorisation, but the gesture of mixing old and new is certainly a familiar gambit.

Previously, for me, the term “Chamber Orchestra” has meant an ordinary orchestra, only smaller: apart from the sound being somewhat thinned out and consequently cleaner, I don't expect a fundamentally different experience. Or, didn't, that is, until last night at Cadogan Hall, where I saw the Australian Chamber Orchestra for the first time.

The Australian Chamber Orchestra, known both for its innovative programming and for the tightness of the ensemble playing, displayed both qualities on Saturday night, the second stop in a five-city, nine-concert tour.

Saturday evening’s concert saw the coming together of two world-class ensembles from opposite ends of the world: Australia’s national orchestra, the Australian Chamber Orchestra, and the world-renowned British vocal group the Hilliard Ensemble.

In the UK, chamber orchestras these days have a slightly old-fashioned image: groups such as the English Chamber Orchestra, the Academy of St Martin in the Fields, and the London Mozart Players – who played a vital part in our musical life of the 1970s and 80s – have recently been struggling to maintain their profiles.

It takes a special orchestra to perform standard repertoire in a completely revelatory way. Having heard Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony performed by the Australian Chamber Orchestra, I almost feel like I do not want to hear it performed in any other way again. There were several unique aspects to their performance.