Back in the days of analogue recordings and before there were playlists, friends and family would exchange music by compiling a cassette tape of favourite tracks and new ‘bangers’.

These mixtapes would often be loaded onto car stereos for the trip down to the family holiday.

Childhood memories of staring through car windows while music competed with the drone of the engine inspired Radiohead guitarist and composer Jonny Greenwood’s orchestral work Popcorn Superhet Receiver, and with its motoric scratched and plucked rhythms and slap bass, an excerpt of the piece opens English violist Lawrence Power’s Isles of Light concert with the Australian Chamber Orchestra.

It sits comfortably between a playful pizzicato rendering of a Henry Purcell ground bass number, literally a curtain-raiser to his opera Timon of Athens, and the ACO’s hummed chorus of Thomas Tallis’s beautiful hymn Why fum’th in fight. The significance of that choice is revealed later.

Lawrence Power and the Australian Chamber Orchestra: Isles of Light. Photo © Nic Walker

London-born Power, making his ACO debut as both soloist and director, has dubbed his tour a “mixtape” of English...