The Australian Chamber Orchestra will enter 2027 with a season shaped by Bach, John Adams, Arvo Pärt, new music and collaborations that will stretch the possibilities of chamber music.
There is a particular quality to hearing an orchestra in Sydney. Outside the concert hall, the city will continue at its usual pace: ferries crossing the harbour, traffic moving through Walsh Bay, voices carrying along the waterfront. Inside, time will become something more measured.
In 2027, the Australian Chamber Orchestra will return to that familiar territory with a season that will look backwards and forwards at once. Curated by Artistic Director Richard Tognetti, the program will bring together music that has endured for centuries with works being written now, alongside artists who will approach the chamber orchestra from very different directions.
The Australian Chamber Orchestra has built much of its identity around that tension. Tradition will not be treated as something fragile to be protected behind glass, nor will contemporary music be presented simply as an exercise in novelty. Instead, the 2027 season will move between the familiar and the unknown, asking what happens when musicians with a deep knowledge of the classical repertoire continue to test its boundaries.
There will be Bach and Arvo Pärt, John Adams and contemporary composers, choral works, percussion, strings and collaborations that will cross musical traditions.
At the centre of it all will be the ACO's musicians, listening closely to one another in spaces where even a small change in sound can alter the character of an entire performance.
Australian Chamber Orchestra And The Art Of Reinvention
The Australian Chamber Orchestra's 2027 season will be built around the idea of transformation.
That will be evident in the choice of repertoire, but also in the range of musicians and ensembles joining the Orchestra. The season will bring together established works and world premieres, international artists and Australian performers, composers working within different traditions and musicians whose approaches to performance will challenge conventional expectations.
For an orchestra whose repertoire extends across centuries, that variety will feel less like a departure than a continuation of an established habit.
The ACO has long operated with a sense of curiosity. Under Richard Tognetti, the ensemble has become known for performances that can place a Baroque work beside contemporary composition without treating the two as belonging to separate worlds.
The 2027 program will continue that approach.
It will also place particular emphasis on collaboration. Rather than inviting guest artists simply to perform alongside the Orchestra, several projects will be constructed around genuine artistic exchange.
The result will be a season that will ask audiences to listen not only to individual pieces, but to the relationships between them.
John Adams And A New Work
One of the defining moments of the 2027 season will come from a composer whose work has consistently resisted easy categorisation.
John Adams will turn 80 in 2027, and the Australian Chamber Orchestra will mark the occasion with a concert curated jointly by Adams and Tognetti.
At its centre will be the world premiere of Gioia, Adams's only new work in his anniversary year. Written specifically for Tognetti, ACO Principal Violin Satu Vänskä and the Orchestra, the work will provide an unusually direct connection between composer and performers.
A world premiere carries its own kind of uncertainty. The audience will hear the piece for the first time at the same moment that its performers bring it into the world. There will be no established interpretation to follow, no accumulated history of performances to draw upon.
That sense of beginning will sit naturally within the ACO's 2027 program.
Adams and Tognetti share an interest in pushing music beyond familiar boundaries, and their collaboration will place that impulse at the heart of the season.
For Sydney audiences, it will also offer an opportunity to hear a new work develop from its first performance rather than encounter it as an established part of the repertoire.
Bach Returns To The Australian Chamber Orchestra
For all the attention given to new music, the Australian Chamber Orchestra will remain deeply connected to the composers whose works have shaped its history.
In 2027, that connection will be particularly evident in a performance of JS Bach's St John Passion.
The Orchestra will join forces with Belgian vocal ensemble Vox Luminis for Bach's choral masterpiece, bringing together instrumental precision and the distinctive sound of a specialist vocal ensemble.
The St John Passion occupies a different musical landscape from a new work such as Gioia. Its origins reach back more than three centuries, and generations of performers and audiences have interpreted it since its first performances.
Yet its central concerns will remain immediate. The work will explore suffering, faith, humanity and compassion through music of extraordinary structural and emotional force.
The ACO's decision to place Bach within the same season as contemporary composers will reinforce one of the program's central ideas: old music does not necessarily become distant simply because it is old.
Sometimes it becomes newly audible.
Australian Chamber Orchestra Welcomes New Voices
The 2027 season will also introduce Sydney audiences to musicians whose careers are developing on international stages.
Cellist Nicolas Altstaedt will direct the season's opening national tour, bringing an approach to performance shaped by both emotional intensity and technical precision.
Violinist Alina Ibragimova will return to perform Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto, one of the most demanding works in the violin repertoire. Its history includes the famous judgement of its original dedicatee, Leopold Auer, who initially considered aspects of the concerto unplayable.
More than a century later, it will provide Ibragimova and the ACO with a very different challenge: how to make a familiar Romantic masterpiece feel alive in the present.
Another significant appearance will come from South African soprano Masabane Cecilia Rangwanasha, who will make her Australian debut with the Orchestra.
She will perform Richard Strauss's Four Last Songs, works written near the end of Strauss's life that contemplate beauty, mortality and departure.
The pairing of Rangwanasha's voice with the ACO will bring another scale of sound into a season often associated with the intimacy of chamber performance.
A New Chapter With Currents
Perhaps the clearest indication of the ACO's interest in contemporary music will be Currents, its inaugural four-day festival devoted entirely to new music.
The festival will be staged at ACO On The Pier, the Orchestra's home at Walsh Bay, where the harbour will sit just beyond the performance space.
That setting will matter.
ACO On The Pier occupies the northern end of Pier 2/3, a working piece of Sydney waterfront transformed into a concert environment. The venue is already closely associated with the ACO's more intimate performances, and Currents will extend that atmosphere across four days.
The 2027 festival will be curated by Guggenheim Fellow Samuel Adams and will feature works by contemporary composers including Missy Mazzoli, Gabriella Smith, Tristan Perich and Caroline Shaw.
Violinist Karen Gomyo and pianist Conor Hanick will join Tognetti and the Orchestra for the program.
The festival will provide space for music written in the present rather than music looking back at an established canon. Its title, Currents, will suggest movement, change and the exchange of ideas.
In a city shaped by water, it will also carry an appropriate local resonance.
Music Without Borders
In November, the ACO will continue its exploration of music beyond conventional boundaries through a collaboration with Rakhi Singh, co-founder and director of the UK-based Manchester Collective.
Singh will make her ACO debut in a program that will bring together ritual, rhythm and percussion.
The performance will feature Sidiki Dembélé, returning to Australia after appearing with Abel Selaocoe and the ACO in 2025.
Dembélé's presence will bring another musical vocabulary into the Orchestra's world. Rhythm will become not simply an accompaniment but a central means of communication, connecting different traditions and approaches to performance.
The Manchester Collective and ACO share an interest in programming across genres and periods without treating those crossings as unusual events.
That philosophy will become particularly visible here.
The concert will be less concerned with drawing borders around musical traditions than with exploring what can happen when musicians listen across them.
The Quiet Power Of Arvo Pärt
Later in the year, the Australian Chamber Orchestra will return to a composer whose music is often associated with stillness.
The Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir will make a long-awaited return for a program dedicated to Arvo Pärt.
The concert will feature three of Pärt's most recognised works: Tabula Rasa, Berliner Messe and Te Deum.
Pärt's music can create a very different kind of concert experience. Rather than relying on constant movement or dramatic contrast, it often allows silence and space to become part of the composition.
The presence of the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir will deepen that atmosphere.
For audiences accustomed to the physical energy of the ACO's string playing, the Pärt program will offer another perspective on what an ensemble can achieve. Sound will not necessarily need to fill every moment. Silence can carry its own weight.
The program's themes of love, hope and human connection will also provide a reflective counterpoint to some of the season's more restless explorations.
Australian Chamber Orchestra And The Future
Looking across the 2027 program, the most striking feature will be its refusal to separate the past from the future.
Bach will sit alongside Adams. Strauss will meet a new generation of performers. Pärt will be heard through a collaboration between Australian instrumentalists and an Estonian choir. New composers will take over ACO On The Pier for Currents.
That range will reflect the Orchestra's understanding of chamber music as something alive rather than fixed.
There is a particular vulnerability in performing music this way. A familiar work can always be played safely, following interpretations that audiences already know. A new work offers no such certainty.
The 2027 season will instead embrace the possibility that a concert might change direction in the moment.
That is partly what makes chamber music distinctive. The scale of the ensemble allows musicians to hear one another with unusual clarity. A phrase can pass from one player to another almost like conversation.
For the audience, the effect can be intimate even inside a large concert hall.
Sydney As The ACO's Musical Home
Sydney will remain central to the season.
The ACO's home at Walsh Bay gives the Orchestra a particularly close relationship with the harbour, and its broader performances across the city connect that intimate setting with Sydney's major cultural venues.
The city will therefore become more than a backdrop for the 2027 program.
It will be part of the rhythm of the season. An evening at ACO On The Pier will begin beside the water. A performance in a larger hall will carry a different sense of scale. Between them, the city will continue to move.
That contrast will suit an orchestra whose musical identity has always been comfortable with change.
The 2027 season will not ask audiences to choose between tradition and experimentation. Instead, it will suggest that the two can exist in the same room.
A Season That Keeps Moving
The Australian Chamber Orchestra's 2027 season will ultimately be a study in movement.
There will be movement between centuries, between musical traditions and between the intimate scale of chamber performance and the larger possibilities of choral and collaborative work.
There will also be movement between certainty and discovery.
A Bach performance will arrive carrying hundreds of years of history. A new work by John Adams will arrive without that history. A contemporary music festival will ask audiences to listen without relying on familiar landmarks.
And through it all, the musicians will remain in close conversation.
In Sydney, where the harbour constantly changes with tide, weather and light, that seems an appropriate way to experience music.
The final note of a performance will disappear into the room, but the listening will continue for a little longer. Outside, the city will return to its ordinary sounds. Boats will move across the dark water, footsteps will pass along the pier, and the night will resume.
For a moment, though, the boundaries between old and new will have become less certain.
That will be the territory the Australian Chamber Orchestra will explore in 2027.
Australian Chamber Orchestra 2027 Season Details
What: Australian Chamber Orchestra 2027 Season
Artistic Director: Richard Tognetti
Where: Performances across Australia, with Sydney performances including ACO On The Pier and other major venues
Highlights: John Adams's Gioia world premiere, Bach's St John Passion, Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto, Strauss's Four Last Songs, Currents contemporary music festival, music by Arvo Pärt, and collaborations with international artists and ensembles
Sydney venue: ACO On The Pier, Pier 2/3, Walsh Bay, Sydney
The complete 2027 performance calendar, dates, ticketing information and venue details will be released by the Orchestra as the season approaches.
Official information: Australian Chamber Orchestra