The Australian Chamber Orchestra’s baby sister comes of age.

Sydney Opera House Concert Hall, June 16

ACO2 is billed as the precocious little sister of the Australian Chamber Orchestra – a chance for the next generation of Australian string players to strut their stuff and to tour the country with an international soloist. And that’s just what we got here in a fizzing concert that did precisely what it said on the can.

The generous program kicked off with an unfamiliar (to me at least) early work by the neo-Romantic Finnish wizard Einojuhani Rautavaara. The Fiddlers is his Opus 1 from 1952 although it wasn’t scored for strings until 20 years later. It comprises three fantasies based on dances written by the 18th-century Finnish fiddler, Samuel Rinda-Nickola. Reminiscences of Bach, melancholy devils and whirling dances take it in turn to hold our attention in music of colour and originality. ACO2’s young players displayed an ideally warm tone, allied with the familiar discipline of their older sibling, and brought out Rautavaara’s trademark harmonic ambiguities to telling effect.

The ensemble was lead with style by ACO supremo Richard Tognetti himself and ACO principal cello Timo-Veikko “Tipi” Valve. If the solo contributions of the...