The Melbourne Chamber Orchestra ends their 2023 season on a high, with its newly commissioned song cycle co-written and sung by ARIA Award-winner Lior.

It’s the pièce de résistance of a program presented by the orchestra’s string players in five Victorian locations, including Melbourne Recital Centre’s main hall. Led by Artistic Director Sophie Rowell on violin, their disciplined yet lush playing proves as mesmerising as the guest artist’s vocals.

Lior and Melbourne Chamber Orchestra perform Of People & Song. Photo © Lucien Fisher

The Of People & Song program begins with Manuel da Falla’s Seven Spanish Folk Songs (1914), counterintuitively performed without voice. Instead, they are arranged for string orchestra by MCO violist Matthew Laing. Having handsomely translated these songs’ varied regional styles, from Moorish, to neo-Romantic, into almost Stravinskian Modernism, Laing also shines in some thrilling little solos, duets and trios for viola, cello (Blair Harris) and violin.

The second work is by Anglo-American Rebecca Clarke, who, as Rowell notes in a brief introduction, has only gained recognition in the years since her death in 1979. Passacaglia (1941), which Clarke originally composed for viola and piano, sees the...