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By Kimbali Harding, AYO CEO
There’s a recurring critique whenever an orchestra programs “unexpected” repertoire: Are we diluting the canon?
After AYO’s Fire & Fantasy at the Sidney Myer Music Bowl, I think the opposite is true.
I deliberated long and hard over this program and I am grateful to the Australian Youth Orchestra young people, Melbourne Symphony Orchestra musicians and the AYO team (including the wonderful Maestro Christian Reif) for being generous, courageous and open minded. Because the way I see it, the future of classical music isn’t a repertoire problem — it’s a listening problem. Different listeners arrive with different reference points.
It’s not about choosing between the inherited canon and the present — it’s about being intentional about how listeners move between them.
Kimbali Harding, AYO CEO
AYO’s Fire and Fantasy was anchored in serious orchestral storytelling, culminating in Stravinsky’s The Firebird Suite (1945) — a work that demands technical precision (and bravura), the full orchestral colour palette, and deep ensemble listening.
But it also widened the entry points into that complexity, drawing on the imaginative worlds contemporary audiences already inhabit; story, film, and yes, video games – not as a substitution, but as an invitation.
That matters because audience pathways are not a marketing question — they’re a question of public value. Sustaining the symphonic artform means thinking carefully about how people encounter it, and how we invite them into its complexity.
As AYO looks toward the next 80 years, our task is to think not just about the artform and legacy we inherit, but the cultural ecosystem we create for the future— one in which excellence, curiosity and participation reinforce each other over time.
Kimbali Harding
This requires more than technical brilliance on the stage, which AYO delivers in spades. It requires attention to how people learn to listen, to belong, and to stay with the artform over time.
Now that the brass motif from the infernal dance has finally left my ear worm, I am trying to remember what repertoire “bridge” first opened the door to my own enduring passion for orchestral music. I like to think that, on a stormy evening at the Sidney Myer Music Bowl, AYO built a few of those bridges for a new generation.