Coming away from this latest Australian Chamber Orchestra concert I couldn’t help thinking to myself: Is there nothing that Richard Tognetti and this band can’t turn their hands to?

To program Richard Wagner – hardly your usual chamber fare – alongside Gustav Mahler and with the bonus of three songs by his wife Alma Mahler-Werfel is adventurous indeed.

But when you think that Wagner used only 15 musicians placed on a staircase to deliver his best birthday present ever, the Siegfried Idyll, to his wife Cosima, and that Arnold Schoenberg arranged Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde for similar forces, perhaps Tognetti’s leap of imagination is less surprising.

Australian Chamber Orchestra: Mahler’s Song of the Earth. Photo © Nic Walker

The upshot is that the programme worked splendidly. A string quartet of Tognetti, Satu Vänskä, violist Stefanie Farrands and cellist Timo-Veikko Valve led the way into the Idyll, which was not only a birthday present but also a celebration of the birth of the couple’s son Siegfried.

The ACO comprised a top-notch mix of core musicians and guests from Sydney Symphony and some European orchestras, with the flute of Sally Walker, a regular...