Joe Chindamo is known to many as a virtuosic jazz pianist, but he has always resisted the label. Even as a child playing accordion, he grew up on arrangements of violin music like Hora staccato and Moto perpetuo.

“I’ve come to realise that I’m much closer to a classical musician,” he says. “I’m too romantic and operatic, and I think jazz musicians have always regarded me with a degree of suspicion. Even when I was most involved with jazz, at home I’d be playing the Goldberg Variations.”

Joe Chindamo. Photo © Cat Li

It should therefore come as no surprise that, over the last decade, he has shifted his centre of gravity towards composing for classical forces.

“In my twenties and thirties, I played piano on most of the film scores that were being recorded in Melbourne, like Phar Lap, The Man from Snowy River II and Evil Angels, so I was surrounded by small studio orchestras. That’s a very different thing from composing for the concert hall.”

Much of that difference lies in how sound lives in the room. The studio environment, he says, is...