Under Richard Tognetti’s direction, the Australian Chamber Orchestra has never been especially interested in acting its age or delivering the same-old. It has made a selling point of placing old and young works into close contact and bringing the familiar in unfamiliar company. Season 2027 is no exception.

In a series of meaningful collisions, Mozart encounters Cage, Reich rubs shoulders with Schubert, and an Australian string orchestra presents a birthday gift to one of America’s most significant living composers – John Adams.

In a season centrepiece, Adams – who turns 80 in 2027 – will partner with the ACO in a concert arranged around the world premiere of Gioia, a new work written specifically for Tognetti and ACO principal violin Satu Vänskä.

Richard Tognetti. Portrait © Georges Antoni

The process of its creation was unconventional, Tognetti tells Limelight. “It’s a kind of reverse commission.”

The story begins with Adams’s son, composer Samuel Adams, whose music the ACO has performed and with whom Tognetti and the orchestra have developed a friendship. John Adams attended the premiere of one of his son’s works, and another relationship bloomed.

The collaboration is not simply a meeting between a major composer and a celebrated Australian ensemble.

For Tognetti, there is a musical logic to it. The ACO already has a strong relationship with Adams’s Shaker Loops, a work it returns to periodically and which, he says, can produce “intense experiences”.

Adams had initially been arranging his Iron Jig for an ACO tour of the United States. Then, Tognetti says, “he just started writing this piece for us … and didn’t stop until he finished it”.

Within weeks, a draft had arrived on Tognetti’s desk. The finished work will be Adams’s only new composition in 2027.

“He writes very quickly,” Tognetti says. “It’s ready for us to start learning, and he’ll make little amendments as we go. But we’re just ecstatic about it.”

Composer John Adams. Photo © Vern Evans

The reason why Adams and the ACO ‘click’, says Tognetti, lies in Adams’s own musical trajectory. An East Coast student steeped in Schoenberg, serialism and European modernism, Adams moved west, becoming a Californian and absorbing the spirit of minimalism – before transforming it into something more expansive and texturally complex. “We are a natural fit,” Tognetti smiles.

Presented from 2–18 September, The John Adams Almanac reflects that breadth of experience. Alongside Gioia are Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge, Ingram Marshall’s Flow, arranged by pianist and composer Timo Andres, a new work by Andres and Adams’s Shaker Loops. Tognetti directs, with Vänskä and Andres joining him.

Season 2027 at a glance

ACO’s 2027 opens in February with cellist Nicolas Altstaedt directing a program that ranges from the Baroque to the present, with C.P.E. Bach’s Cello Concerto in A major at its heart.

March brings one of Tognetti’s long-held ambitions: Bach’s St John Passion. The ACO will tour nationally with Belgian vocal ensemble Vox Luminis, led artistically by Lionel Meunier, with Florian Sievers as Evangelist.

For Tognetti, who has devoted a substantial part of his musical life to Bach, the work provides multiple ways into a musical and cultural world that remains very much alive in the present. “The peak of Western culture is surely these amazing compositions,” he says.

Alina Ibragimova. Photo ©Keith Saunders

In May, violinist Alina Ibragimova returns to direct and perform Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto – a work once considered so technically formidable that its original dedicatee regarded it as unplayable.

Ibragimova, says Tognetti, is a “wonderful soul” whose playing has a warmth and vibrancy he admires. “Everything I hear her play is really refreshing,” he says.

New music receives a more concentrated platform in June in Currents, the ACO’s inaugural four-day mini-festival at its Sydney home, ACO On The Pier.

Curated in 2027 by Samuel Adams, it will be a concentrated exploration of contemporary American music, pairing established and emerging composers with radically different approaches to sound.

Young Americans (3 June), directed by Tognetti, ranges from Gabriella Smith and Reena Esmail to Missy Mazzoli, Ted Hearne, Jessie Montgomery, Samuel Adams and Paul Wiancko; while Surface Image (4 June) presents Tristan Perich’s 40-channel electronic work with pianist Conor Hanick.

On 5 June, Now Is the Time puts Mozart into dialogue with John Cage, including Cage’s notorious 4′33″, before moving to Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time.

The closing program on 6 June, Karen Gomyo Plays Bach, brings Bach’s Art of Fugue, Brandenburg Concerto No. 3 and Double Violin Concerto together with contemporary works by Samuel Adams, Caroline Shaw and John Luther Adams.

The ACO Neilson Studio. Photo supplied

For Tognetti, Currents builds on a long-held ambition. When ACO On The Pier was conceived, he and his colleagues imagined the building as something more than an ‘in-and-out’ concert venue.

“We’ve always been dreaming of a festival, a place that audiences can come to and become immersed in rather than simply arrive for a concert and leave.”

The post-COVID opening made that difficult, Tognetti says, but the ambition never dimmed. “Precincts are made by what people do in them, and so we’re doing things lie Currents. We’re making the precinct.”

The building’s beauty and flexibility is part of the attraction. The ACO can use its principal spaces, studio, foyers and balcony, with Tognetti recalling the acoustic possibilities revealed during earlier immersive projects.

“It’s like an instrument itself,” he says. “Working here reminds me of those photos taken from the inside violins and cellos. It’s architecture and music combined.”

Alexander Melnikov. Photo © Sasha Malnikov

The ACO main season continues in June with Tognetti directing a concert focused on Mozart alongside pianist Alexander Melnikov, before ACO In Motion (29 July–16 August) brings Steve Reich’s Different Trains, Missy Mazzoli’s The Shield of the Heart is the Heart together with Tognetti’s arrangement of Schubert’s Death and the Maiden Quartet.

In November, Manchester Collective co-founder Rakhi Singh makes her ACO debut alongside South African percussionist Sidiki Dembélé, while the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir returns for a program devoted to Arvo Pärt, including his Tabula Rasa, Berliner Messe and Te Deum.

The season ends in November with a visit from one of the most exciting sopranos in the world right now: South Africa’s Masabane Cecilia Rangwanasha, who makes her Australian debut with the ACO in Strauss’s Four Last Songs, a program that also includes music by Pärt, Britten, Lutosławski and an as-yet-untitled new work by Australia’s Jack Symonds.

For more information on the Australian Chamber Orchestra in 2027 and season ticket purchases, visit aco.com.au