Australian Chamber Orchestra 2012 Season at City Hall

The Australian Chamber Orchestra's 2012 season has been named the best of any arts company in the country by Limelight magazine: "If there is one program this year in which everything could be classed as "unmissable", and in which every concert feels too far away, it's the ACO's."

Musically and emotionally ambitious is a concert combining Schubert's Trout Quintet and Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time, polar opposites in feeling yet linked by the circumstances of their creation.

Russian pianist Polina Leschenko returns in February to feature in the ACO's next recording for the BIS record label. Leschenko is a Chopin specialist and premieres Tognetti's new arrangement of the Piano Concerto No.1. In the same concert, the ACO's Guarneri, Stradivarius and Guadagnini violins are compared in a Paganini arrangement by Tognetti.

In a season that swoops across centuries, continents and styles, it's nice to have two moments of focus. Richard Egarr's program in October delves into music from the beginning of the Baroque to the start of the Classical period - 200 years of immense invention and imagination, particularly in string writing. Steven Osborne is guest pianist in November in an entirely Russian program by Prokofiev, Shostakovich and Tchaikovsky.

As Limelight says, "It's a season full of twists and turns buy, mysteriously, it somehow all hangs together like a brightly lit constellation - proof that programming can be an artform unto itself."