The Australian Chamber Orchestra’s Cinemusica programme, in partnership with Sydney-based trio, Synergy Percussion, is a celebration of music written for the screen, music repurposed for the screen, and music written over the past fifty years, the period in which the film score has flourished. It’s clear from having heard the programme how much music can add to a film: there’s Norman Bates with a knife, there’s Jack Torrance with an axe, and then there’s the music that made them that much more memorable.

The programme opened with striking intensity. Xenakis’s Voile is an explosion of dense, visceral clusters, which the ACO tackled with a focused and piercing timbre that still fell short of harsh, allowing for the emotional depth of the highly dramatic work to come through. After this arresting opening, the selections that followed from Thomas Newman’s American Beauty were a little underwhelming. Don’t get me wrong – it’s a great film soundtrack in that it accompanies the film perfectly; the percussive and repetitive score fits nicely with the sentiments of the various characters from the film, all of whom feel imprisoned or repressed by their American middle-class lives. On its own, however, without the context of the film, Newman’s...