In another musical coup for Snow Concert Hall’s artistic director Ana de la Vega, a German orchestra with a unique conductor-less model is coming to Canberra next week to perform works by Mozart and Bach – not JS, but his youngest son, Johann Christian Bach.

Performing more than 100 concerts a year globally, the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra will  be in Canberra for the first time and will tour with Australian-born fortepianist Kristian Bezuidenhout, one of their regular guests.

Opening with JC Bach’s dramatic Symphony No. 6, the evening will then proceed with three of Mozart’s works, beginning with his Piano Concerto No. 9 in E-flat major, composed in 1777 when he was young so known as the Jeunehomme and also including Violin Concerto No. 5 in A major, K. 219 —his ‘Turkish’ concerto, led from the violin by Gottfried von der Goltz.

The orchestra was founded by a group of graduates of the Freiburg University of Music in 1987 with the aim of playing baroque and classical music in a historically informed manner and now has more than 130 recordings to its name.

This season it’ll be performing Mozart’s Idomeneo at the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg and at the Teatro Real in Madrid, Handel’s Tamerlano in concert at the Palau de la Música in Catalana, on a tour of Spain and Belgium with the Belgian vocal ensemble Vox Luminis and in the concert programs Grand Tour and Viva Vivaldi!

The orchestra varies in size as it tours the world, but Canberra will get a substantial version of around 29 members, as I find I catch up with violinist Péter Barczi, who’s played with the orchestra since 2021.

Barczi also plays with the Almaviva String Quartet and across the border in Switzerland as concertmaster of the Camerata Basel. He’s also a member of the La Cetra Baroque Orchestra Basel and the Orchestra of the JS Bach Foundation in St Gallen. In 2006 he founded the Capricornus Consort Basel.

It’s a whirlwind tour, he says, so that that the day after they perform here they’ll be flying to Japan with pretty much the same program, will stay for a week, then fly home to Freiburg in southwest Germany near the Black Forest.

Although it’s called a Baroque orchestra, its instrumentalists have a much broader practice than that and so on this visit they’ll perform later music.

The orchestra, Barczi says, has been to Australia before, memorably performing two concerts in Melbourne just before lockdown.

He says the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra has no conductor. It has always been directed by the musicians, not the conductor.

“This is very important, we are all equals in this orchestra,” he says.

“The nice thing is that it’s normal for all the musicians to be requested to give input, musically and technically, so we can be sure that all the musicians believe in and have made their point about the music. This is what we want to have all the time.

“But we do invite conductors for operas and symphonic or romantic music. We love to have them and we profit from them, but we don’t want to have them with us always.”

Freiburg Baroque Orchestra, Snow Concert Hall, Red Hill, March 29.