Cover image: Genevieve Lacey & Simon Martyn-Ellis with the Australian Chamber Orchestra. Credit Charlie Kinross

The Australian Chamber Orchestra performed ‘A Musical Awakening’  on 10 September 2025 at Winthrop Hall.

In Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, Marco Polo describes various cities to Kublai Khan, all of them just surreal versions of Venice itself.

“There is still one (city) of which you never speak.”

Marco Polo bowed his head.

“Venice,” the Khan said.

Marco smiled. “What else do you believe I have been talking to you about?”

The emperor did not turn a hair. “And yet I have never heard you mention that name.”

The centrepiece of this ACO Winthrop Hall concert curated and directed by cellist Timo Veikko-Valve and featuring rock star recorder player – almost a contradiction in terms! – Genevieve Lacey, was inspired by Invisible Cities. The remainder of the works in a program entitled A Musical Awakening clung to it like diamond-studded barnacles. The effect was as magical as that of Calvino’s novel.

In Imaginary Cities: A Baroque Fantasy, composer and arranger Erkki Veltheim describes many Venices via the music of Venetian Baroque composers Vivaldi, Monteverdi and the brilliant Barbara Strozzi. A taped soundscape “alludes to various imaginary sounds that our composers might have experienced in the bustling nexus of cultures that Venice had become.”

Here, Lacey, the marvellous theorbo and Baroque guitarist Simon Martyn-Ellis and the ACO realised with style and panache the grand opening of Monteverdi’s Vespro della Beata Vergine, two electrifying movements from two of Vivaldi’s recorder concertos and a heartbreaking lamento from Strozzi. Baroque indeed, in the original sense of describing an irregularly shaped pearl.

The program’s opening and closing works were equally affecting, if in very different ways. For where a veiled melancholy suffused with pastel luminosity the arrangements of Hildegard von Bingen’s Ave generosa (recorder and strings) Max Richter’s On the Nature of Daylight (theorbo and strings), Beethoven’s famous Molto adagio from his String Quartet in A minor Op.132, the so-called “Holy Song of Thanksgiving,” found the ACO reaching for those same stars which granted Beethoven the recovery from a serious illness which occasioned the writing of this profound, joyous movement.

By way of further contrast, David Lang’s playful new recorder concerto flute and echo, Melody Eotvos’s brilliant Meraki and Jaakko Kuusisto’s Wiima, teeming with wriggly glissandi, afforded the ACO and friends manifold opportunities to surface yet more of their own multi-faceted invisible cities of music and the mind.