The Melbourne Chamber Orchestra launches its 2026 season with a polished performance of an extraordinarily rich and insightful program.

Artistic Director Sophie Rowell frames the program as a blend of old and new: an opportunity to see old works in a new light and create new works with novel links to the past.

Melbourne Chamber Orchestra: Flexible Sky. Photo © Catherine Turner

Machiavelli’s Mirror: A Renaissance Suite for String Orchestra (world premiere) by Australian composer Joe Chindamo clearly meets this brief. Chindamo has blended period and modern musical styles to craft musical portraits of eight renaissance luminaries.

The opening bars of each portrait sound familiar, but an aberrant harmony or rhythm takes the music down a distinctively modern path. Chindamo colours the portraits inventively, with trills, for example, representing whispers in the Medici court, and rich, celestial-sounding harmonies for da Vinci.

Melbourne Chamber Orchestra and Slava Grigoryan: Flexible Sky. Photo © Catherine Turner

Chindamo’s music creates a bridge to the Baroque era; and in a natural segue, Slava Grigoryan joins the MCO to play (as written) Vivaldi’s D major guitar concerto. They play it beautifully; and the thrill that comes from witnessing music being brought to life on stage is a salient reminder of the extra dimension a live performance adds to the musical experience.

In another fresh take on an iconic work, the MCO plays an arrangement of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata by the contemporary Polish composer Jakub Kowalewski. Transcribing this iconic work is a bold act. The violas have the opening arpeggio theme, and the upper and lower strings are able to sustain their long melodic lines without fading away. The effect is different, but no less moving than the original, and Bartok’s Romanian Folk Dances, with their angular rhythms and strident harmonies, anchor the second half of the program in the modern world.

Melbourne Chamber Orchestra and Slava Grigoryan: Flexible Sky. Photo © Catherine Turner

Grigoryan has had a long association with Austrian jazz composer and guitarist Wolfgang Muthspiel, and Muthspiel has agreed to reshape an earlier work, now called Flexible Sky Redux, especially for Grigoryan and the MCO. Muthspiel’s eclectic, dynamic composition defies classification. There are crystalline melodies, Latin rhythms, suspenseful harmonies and compelling solos for the ensemble players. The performers’ joy in the music is palpable throughout.

Matthew Hindson’s Song and Dance is a fitting finale to this time-travelling program. It was commissioned to suggest the vastly different experiences of young people living in 1916 (wartime) and 2006. The tender song gives way to an upbeat, exciting dance, and the evening ends on a high note.

Melbourne Chamber Orchestra performs Flexible Sky at Hamer Hall, Melbourne on 1 March.