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...