The Australian Chamber Orchestra is celebrating fifty years in 2025 and is one of the most acclaimed chamber orchestras in the world, renowned for their inspired programming, unrivalled virtuosity, energy and individuality. Under the direction of Artistic Director Richard Tognetti, they take audiences on the adventure to create truly transformative experiences. Patricia Kopatchinskaja (aka PatKop) is experimental, unpredictable and brilliant. For her, music is alive and made in the moment, and as an acclaimed soloist, reinventive director and ground-breaking composer, she creates an ephemeral magic that can never be replicated. Kopatchinskaja is happiest with an ensemble that likes to blur lines and push boundaries, so the ACO is a natural home. She returns after more than a decade to direct the Orchestra in a program that showcases her dynamic virtuosity and enormous range, from Ravel’s showpiece Tzigane, to Schubert’s semi-autobiographical Death and the Maiden arranged for string orchestra. This remarkable work represents Schubert’s grappling with impending death. Schubert’s maiden is beautiful, young, and determined to live. Death is resolute, alluring, comforting and kind. Their conversation is filled with tenderness and melancholy, resulting in music that is at once heartbreaking and reassuring. Interspersed will be the world premiere of PatKop’s Danses Macabre, an extraordinary new work full of spirituality and drama that further reveals the heart of Schubert’s masterpiece.