“The Australian Chamber Orchestra is uniformly high-octane, arresting and never ordinary.”
 

The Australian.

The Australian Chamber Orchestra lives and breathes music, making waves around the world for its explosive performances that redefine orchestral music. With their fearless leader of 35 years, Artistic Director Richard Tognetti, in 2025 the Orchestra celebrates 50 years of invention, disruption and unforgettable music-making.

The ACO performs more than 100 concerts each year, with programs that embrace celebrated classics alongside new commissions and ground-breaking collaborations, working with artists and musicians who share their ideology: from Emmanuel Pahud, Steven Isserlis, Patricia Kopatchinskaja, Pekka Kuusisto, Nicolas Altstaedt and William Barton, to Jonny Greenwood, Neil Finn and Meow Meow; to visual artists and film makers such as Bill Henson, Shaun Tan, Jane Campion, and Jennifer Peedom, who co-create unique, hybrid productions for which the ACO has become renowned.

The ACO has its own streaming platform, ACO On Demand, which hosts the Orchestra’s award-winning cinematic concert films, ACO StudioCasts, alongside live concert streams. The Orchestra also has an active recording program. Its recordings of Bach’s violin works won three consecutive ARIA Awards. Recent releases include Water | Night Music, the first Australian-produced classical vinyl for two decades, Beethoven 1, 2, & 3 Eroica and ARIA award-winning albums River and Indies & Idols.

In 2022 the ACO opened a new, world class venue, ACO On The Pier, continuing their dedication to creating and presenting transformative experiences for all music lovers.
 

Isabella Luisa Diaz is the co-director of Company 29, a contemporary circus collective. They were born in Chicago, Illinois where from a young age, they found a joy for movement and a hankering for heights. They spent their youth competing in gymnastics and studying dance, continuing on at Western Michigan University and the Joffrey Ballet School. In 2016 they joined Pilobolus Dance Theatre as a part of their main company and toured around the world for 4 years. In 2021, they began working with The 7 Fingers contemporary circus and was part of the creation for the show ‘Dear San Francisco’ and the Broadway musical ‘Water for Elephants’. They have held various roles with US-based circuses such as Shoestring Circus and Midnight Circus, including acrobat, musician, guest director, and co-composer.  Isabella is a collector of hobbies, lover of books and a fiend for a good fun fact. They are very excited to be working with the Fuse team at the Banff centre this season.

Andrew Johnson has been Principal Percussionist of the National Arts Centre Orchestra since June 2025, and was previously in the same position with the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra and l’Orchestre Symphonique de Quebec. Andrew is a former fellow at the New World Symphony, and has appeared professionally with the Toronto Symphony, the National Arts Centre Orchestra, the Sarasota Orchestra, and the Boston Philharmonic. He has performed with conductors Christoph von Dohnanyi, Michael Tilson Thomas, Robert Spano, and Stéphane Denève, and has attended a variety of summer festivals including Tanglewood Music Center, Spoleto Festival USA, Texas Music Festival, and the National Youth Orchestra of Canada.

In addition to orchestral playing, Andrew enjoys performing contemporary solo and chamber music, and within this context has worked under the guidance of Steve Reich, Dawn Upshaw, Steven Drury, and Steve Mackey. Andrew grew up in Nova Scotia and studied at New England Conservatory and Boston University. He is a student of Will Hudgins, Timothy Genis, and Mark Adam. In his spare time, he enjoys playing and watching hockey, and spending time with his wife, Lia, and their dog, Henry. Andrew is an endorser of Zildjian cymbals and Freer Percussion products.

Dai Fujikura is a composer based in London, UK. Born in 1977 in Osaka, Japan, Dai was fifteen when he moved to the UK and then studied under Sir. George Benjamin. 

In recent years, his activities have been diverse. His opera, “A Dream of Armageddon,” based on a short story by H.G. Wells, which draws attention to the threat of totalitarianism, had its world premiere at the New National Theatre Tokyo in 2020. The opera was selected as the "Best of the Year" by numerous music magazines. In the same year, his Fourth Piano Concerto (Akiko's Piano), inspired by a piano owned by a woman who was a victim of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, had its world premiere. This was the 75th anniversary of the atomic bombing and was released by Sony Music. 

Following that year, “Entwine” was performed by the WDR Sinfonieorchester Köln, Yomiuri Nippon Symphony Orchestra, Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin, and Hong Kong Sinfonietta. The Orchestre National de Bretagne and the New York Philharmonic are also scheduled to perform it in 2024. 

Another recent orchestral work, “Wavering World,” was commissioned and performed by the Seattle Symphony, Pacific Philharmonia Tokyo, Musikalische Akademie des Nationaltheater-Orchesters Mannheim, and the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. 

Unique works such as “Metamorphosis of a Living Room,” a music theatre piece created in collaboration with theatre director Toshiki Okada, was commissioned and staged by Wiener Festwochen. This piece was later performed in Hanover and Amsterdam, and it is planned to be staged in Japan. Additionally, “Green Tea Concerto” for flauto traverso and baroque ensemble was commissioned by the B’Rock Orchestra, and “Comic Breath” was commissioned by the Junge Deutsche Philharmonie and the New World Symphony Orchestra.

Celebrated as “exquisite” by the Philadelphia Inquirer and a “pianist of exceptional talent” by Gramophone, Grammy Award–winning pianist Michelle Cann is one of the most sought-after artists of her generation. Recent engagements include appearances with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, The Cleveland Orchestra, The Philadelphia Orchestra, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the National Symphony Orchestra, and the São Paulo Municipal Symphony Orchestra. She has received the Sphinx Medal of Excellence and the Andrew Wolf Chamber Music Award, and was the inaugural Christel DeHaan Artistic Partner of the American Piano Awards.

Highlights of Cann’s 2025–2026 season include performances with the Colorado Symphony, the New Jersey Symphony, the Kansas City Symphony, and the National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland. She also gives the world premiere of a new piano concerto by Valerie Coleman with the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington, D.C. Her recital engagements include Stanford Live, Music Toronto, Chamber Music Detroit, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Spivey Hall, and a recital tour in China.

Recognized as one of the leading interpreters of Florence Price’s piano music, Cann gave the New York premiere of Price’s Piano Concerto in One Movement with The Dream Unfinished Orchestra in 2016. Her recording of the concerto with the New York Youth Symphony won a Grammy Award in 2023 for Best Orchestral Performance. She won another Grammy Award in 2025 for Beyond the Years: Unpublished Songs of Florence Price, recorded with soprano Karen Slack, featuring 19 previously unpublished songs by Price. Her acclaimed debut solo album, Revival, featuring works by Price and Margaret Bonds, was released in 2023.

Cann holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the Cleveland Institute of Music and an artist diploma from the Curtis Institute of Music. She joined the piano faculty at the Curtis Institute of Music in 2020 as the first holder of the Eleanor Sokoloff Chair in Piano Studies, and she also teaches piano at the Manhattan School of Music.

Image by Titilayo Ayangade.

Composer and pianist Timo Andres (b. 1985, Palo Alto, CA) grew up in rural Connecticut and lives in Brooklyn, NY.

2023/24 highlights include a solo recital debut for Carnegie Hall, new commissions for the Moab Music Festival and the Segerstrom Center for the Arts, a tour with the Calder Quartet including performances at San Francisco Performances and Chamber Music Albuquerque, and the world premiere of a piano concerto for Aaron Diehl at the Los Angeles Philharmonic, led by John Adams. Andres’s orchestrations and arrangements for Justin Peck’s new production of Sufjan Stevens’s Illinoise, were premiered in a sold-out Summer 2023 run at The Fisher Center at Bard; the production has upcoming dates in Chicago, New York and elsewhere.

Notable works include Everything Happens So Much for the Boston Symphony; Strong Language for the Takács Quartet, commissioned by Carnegie Hall and the Shriver Hall Concert Series; Steady Hand, a two-piano concerto commissioned by the Britten Sinfonia premiered at the Barbican by Andres and David Kaplan; and The Blind Banister, a concerto for Jonathan Biss, which was a 2016 Pulitzer Prize Finalist.

As a pianist, Timo Andres has appeared with the LA Phil, North Carolina Symphony, the Albany Symphony, the New World Symphony, the Metropolis Ensemble, among others. He has performed solo recitals for Lincoln Center, and Wigmore Hall.

Collaborators include Becca Stevens, Jeffrey Kahane, Gabriel Kahane, Brad Mehldau, Nadia Sirota, and Philip Glass, who selected Andres as the recipient of the City of Toronto Glenn Gould Protégé Prize. He was nominated for a Grammy award for his performances on 2021’s The Arching Path, an album of music by Christopher Cerrone.

Andres’s collaborations with Sufjan Stevens also include his May 2023 recording with Conor Hanick of Stevens’s latest album, Reflections; arrangements of ballets for New York City Ballet, and a solo piano album, The Decalogue.

A Nonesuch Records artist, Timo Andres has multiple solo albums on the label (with more set for upcoming release in 2024) and is featured as composer and pianist on the May 2020 release I Still Play, an album celebrating Robert Hurwitz. A Yale School of Music graduate, he is a Yamaha/Bösendorfer Artist and is on the composition faculty at the Mannes School of Music at the New School.