On the second night of their first tour of the season, the Australian Chamber Orchestra presented their Canberra audience with a program celebrating revered, renewed and reinvented traditions. Two composers born in 1980 were paired with two of the medium's greatest masters.

Anna Clyne, a London-born, Brooklyn-based composer, opened the concert with her 2012 double violin concerto Prince of Clouds. This work, nominated for a Grammy in 2015, was written for a pair of violinists, student and mentor, a theme that runs not only though the work, but this evening's entire concert program.

The piece explores this dynamic on a number of levels, with the composer taking inspiration from Bach's double concerto. Clyne's innovative New York sensibilities (having studied with Julia Wolfe) combined with lush romantic orchestrations, utilised every trick the ACO had up their sleeve. The evening's soloists were two of the ensemble's youngest members, whose sounds blended perfectly, shimmering one moment and growling the next.

Following on from the heights and depths of the Clyne was Tchaikovsky's Serenade for Strings in C Major, Op. 48. This work was labelled the composer's finest by his teacher Anton Rubenstein. The second movement was encored at the premiere in 1880, and was no less enthusiastically received here, though in our own relatively reserved, 21st-Century fashion. Like Clyne's nod to Bach, here Tchaikovsky is unapologetically referencing his hero, Mozart. In this work, somewhere between a string quartet and a symphony, the Russian composer has expertly crafted a 19th-Century prism, through which the genius of the Viennese master, as well as his own, is refracted in a seemingly endless array of lush orchestration and imaginative melodic devices.

The highlight of the evening, and a rare treat in Canberra, followed the interval: a world premiere double bass concerto. Commissioned by the ACO to celebrate bassist Maxime Bibeau's 20th year with the ensemble, Missy Mizzoli's Dark with Excessive Bright is a single-movement work illustrating the imagined history of Bibeau's 450-year-old instrument, which lay unused in an Italian monastery for almost all of its life. Mizzoli, a former student of David Lang (a colleague of Clyne's teacher, Wolfe), took the audience on a journey through the history of Western classical music, with the bass at the helm. This tour was subtle and sophisticated, avoiding every cliche, with the composer's expert orchestration skills stretching and contorting the textures of the ensemble, like a mysterious liquid being poured into one exquisite vessel after another.

To close the evening, Brahms' String Sextet No. 2 in G Major, Op. 36 was given new life in an arrangement for string orchestra by the ACO's director, Richard Tognetti. Called by the great musicologist, Sir Donald Tovey, "the most ethereal of Brahms' larger works", this piece seemed to perfectly tie together elements from each of the works earlier in the program; mystically referencing even the offerings from Clyne and Mizzoli, written about 150 years later.

The ensemble were joined on stage by students from Melbourne's Australian National Academy of Music, some of the most talented young string players in the country. The combined group was large but nimble, expertly navigating the complex harmonies of Brahms' romantic vocabulary, a fittingly triumphant end to a night of musical celebration across the centuries.