For the first time in nearly 30 years, Sir Neville Marriner’s chamber orchestra will tour nationally in 2017.

The Academy of St Martin in the Fields will tour Australia in April 2017, performing at Melbourne Recital Centre, the Sydney Opera House and Queensland Performing Arts Centre (QPAC), Brisbane. Celebrated violinist Joshua Bell, the Academy’s Music Director since 2011, will lead the influential English chamber orchestra in its first tour Down Under in nearly three decades.

^{Joshua Bell with Academy of St Martin in the Fields. Photo by Ian Douglas}

Founded by the late Sir Neville Marriner, who died in October aged 92 and was expected to have led the tour, the Academy takes its name from the church in London’s Trafalgar Square, where it gave its first performance in 1959.

In the decades since, the Academy has become one of the world’s most revered and most recorded chamber orchestras in the world, with an extensive discography that includes their classic recordings of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons and the soundtrack to Miloš Forman’s Academy Award-winning film Amadeus.

Bell, who leads the orchestra from the first violin and performs as a soloist, said: “I am...