The Australian Chamber Orchestra (ACO) turns fifty next month. On 21 November 1975, it played its first concert, at what was then the new Sydney Opera House. It will soon be back there – fifty years to the day – reminding us of its rude artistic health. In the lead up to this half-century celebration, the ACO has reprised the very popular ‘cinematic and musical odyssey’ Mountain, of which ACO Artistic Director Richard Tognetti was a composer, musical director, and joint initiator in 2017. This odyssey traces human interactions with high mountains, from trepidation to fascination; as the ACO puts it, high mountains hold us ‘spellbound’. The concert conceives of mountains both physically, as rock and ice, and symbolically, in our dreams and desires.

Mountain is a multisensory tapestry with four separate strands that appeals to our different senses. Firstly, it appeals to our visual senses, through film director Jennifer Peedom’s skilful weaving of dramatic clips, many from extreme sports, with slower-paced, beautiful mountain landscapes, viewed against sunny, cloudy or misty backdrops.

Mountain also has three separate – potentially separable – aural strands. There is a musical strand, curated or created by Tognetti, consisting of twenty-one tracks. Nine of these are drawn from existing classics (by Vivaldi, Chopin, Grieg, Beethoven); four are from vibrant, more recent compositions (Peter Sculthorpe’s Djilile; Arvo Pärt’s Für Alina and his magical Fratres); and the remaining eight introductory, joining, and culminating sections are from Tognetti’s own hand and include Prelude, Sublime Horror, Madness Bites, and A Final Bridge.

But there is another aural track, consisting of nature’s sounds – the whoosh of an avalanche, the roar of fierce winds at the summit, the tinkle of animals’ bells, the clinking of adventurers’ equipment, the thud of human bodies against stone or ice, and even the so-called ‘deafening’ silence of wilderness. And then there is a documentary-style voiceover, with a reasonably extensive text written by Robert Macfarlane, author of Mountains of the Mind (2003), and narrated by Willem Dafoe.

So far, Mountain has had two modes of performance: first, as a live musical performance, which incorporates a pre-recorded video; and now, on ABC iView, as an integrated video in which all four strands – including its music – are woven into a single audiovisual tapestry.

Mountain, performed by the Australian Chamber Orchestra (photograph by Maria Boyadgis)

The reprise première of Mountain in Brisbane maintained most of the players from the original 2017 production – including Tognetti as solo violinist, Tamara-Anna Cislowska as solo pianist, and Satu Vänskä as solo vocalist (and violinist). The original video was mostly intact, although it had some small alterations or clarifications in movement titles, narrative wording, and short visual scenes.

The complex intentions of this multi-strand project prompts the following questions: Was the blend of items in the musical strand effective, particularly in relation to Tognetti’s role as composer? How well did the four strands of the overall tapestry blend together in the real-time experience of Brisbane’s reasonably lively audience? And what messages might we take from this seventy-five-minute gala performance, soon to be presented in Sydney, Canberra, and Melbourne?

We all perceive such creative collaborations in different ways. That is, we see and hear differently, and in different proportions. Tognetti explains in his essay, ‘When screen meets sound’, published in the program booklet: ‘sometimes you hear better by seeing, and sometimes you see better by hearing … That’s synaesthesia’. Yes, we can switch between the senses, even conjuring up smells, tastes, or touches that we associate with certain situations. Ours is, however, a predominantly visual age, in which other senses are all too readily relegated to background, only stimulated to ‘enhance mood’ or manipulate our thoughts.

Tognetti’s crafting of the musical score – whether by selection, arrangement or direct composition – was masterful and complemented Peedom’s contribution. It was useful to learn how they collaborated creatively; when it came to the standard musical classics (by Vivaldi, Beethoven, and so on), Peedom would ‘craft [visual] images around those masterpieces’. In other instances, Tognetti would ‘write something bespoke’ when Peedom brought him moving images; he would, attempt, as he writes ‘to inhabit this physical and geographical drama’.  Ultimately, Mountain makes a final, transcendental turn to Beethoven, moving on from the visual segments featuring Everest – that emperor of mountains – to ‘Piano Concerto No. 5 in E-flat Major, Op. 73’, known as the ‘Emperor Concerto’, and performed here by Cislowska.

This gala performance also reminds us that live musical performance can itself be an extreme form of ‘sport’, even more so when you have to maintain split-second coordination with the cinematic track. The normal momentary nuances of classical interpretation sometimes must be jettisoned to keep in sync with the athletic on-screen antics. ACO’s performance was, then, less technically precise than the film production, which benefited from the luxury of multiple takes and post-recording treatments.

And it could not rival the well-nigh perfection of the complete film’s visual element, drawn from some two thousand hours of footage from at least fifteen countries. As the end credits showed, the work involved forty ‘featured athletes’ and forty camera people – most notably Renan Ozturk, who ‘isn’t just a man with a camera; he lives in actuality on the rock face …  as a free solo climber’. Hence, there was the occasional need for Tognetti (with a clicker in his right ear) to speed up or slow down the live performance – lest it be the orchestra, rather than the lithe skier or daredevil cyclist, who experiences a nasty touch-down.

There was, however, another aspect of this almost Wagnerian ‘multi-faceted artwork’ that did not work so well: the narration. Its text was neither included nor seriously discussed in the program booklet, although half a dozen short quotations from it were included, alongside a mountain panorama. Macfarlane’s text, so often reliant on glib aphorisms, can come across as a compulsory ‘bluffer’s guide’ to a visual-musical synthesis of greater subtlety – one that cries out for individual hearings, seeings, and opinions.

The narration was calm and all-knowing, apparently evincing the fundamental truths of human relations with high mountains: ‘fascination replaced trepidation, adventure replaced reverence’; ‘they watched us arrive, they will watch us leave’; ‘half in love with themselves, and half in love with oblivion’. It presented an essentially historical account with an almost primary-school-level of false clarity. But part of my ambivalence might lie in the God-like, trans-Atlantic voiceover of Willem Dafoe. He was well qualified, having acted or voiced over characters from Jesus Christ to the Antichrist in his long career. Yet I did wonder if, in addition to the live music, a live on-stage narration might have been in order.

So, what were the deeper human messages of Mountain? Our defilement of nature? The cynical exploitation of the oppressed? The triumph of capitalism, as exemplified by high-net-worth thrill seekers?

Mountain was performed at the QPAC Concert Hall in Brisbane on October 27, and continues at the Sydney Opera House on October 28, Canberra’s Llewellyn Hall on October 29, and Melbourne’s Hamer Hall on October 30. Performance attended: 27 October 2025.