Over the years, the Australian Brandenburg Orchestra’s performances have ranged from conventional concerts to fully fledged spectacles boasting elaborate scenery and even acrobats. Others could best be described as semi-staged, again with varying degrees of complexity – a projection here, a tableau vivant there, or simply a marriage of words and music with good lighting.

The latter is what we have here, with ABO’s latest offering, Vivaldi’s Legacy, which is led on Baroque Violin by Guest Director Augusta McKay Lodge in her Australian debut.

The music in question is that of Vivaldi and his contemporaries, Pisendel, Tartini and Visconti – a compelling catalogue that is as effervescent as it is affecting.

The words are by Alana Valentine, and what beautiful words they are. That should come as no surprise; Valentine wrote and directed the AWGIE Award-winning Notre-Dame for ABO, while the oratorio Watershed: The Death of Dr Duncan, co-written with Christos Tsiolkas and composed by Joseph Twist, is one of the finest additions to the canon in recent times.

McKay Lodge and Valentine take us back to Venice’s convent and orphanage, L’Ospedale della Pietà, where we encounter the prodigiously talented multi-instrumentalist Anna Maria della Pietà, embodied here to perfection by actor...