Pop-sensations Lime Cordiale are joining forces with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra for three shows that bring a symphonic flavour to their rock tunes.
Taking place from 27 August to November 15 2025, Lime Cordiale’s Symphony Orchestras Tour will be coming to Melbourne for three nights in September. Partnering with the MSO, the duo will be bringing fresh arrangements of their favourite songs to audiences at Hamer Hall, with a third concert added on the Saturday evening due to popular demand.
As guitarist Oli Leimbach tells me over the phone, the prospect of performing with a wide range of different orchestras across the country is one for which he and his brother (Louis Leimbach) are keenly excited. “We’ll be mainly working on about an hour-and-a-half of music that we completely reorchestrate and rearrange,” he says, explaining that the tour retains the same conductor throughout even as the players change in each city. Exceptionally sought-after composer Alex Turley will handle the arrangements, with his previous collaborations including Banks, Ben Folds and Rüfüs Du Sol, among others.
Lime Cordiale and the MSO
- Thursday 11 September 2025 – 7:30pm at Hamer Hall
- Friday 12 September 2025 – 7:30pm at Hamer Hall
- Saturday 13 September 2025 – 7:30pm at Hamer Hall
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The conductor in this case will be Vanessa Scammell, who has previously worked with Birds of Tokyo and The Cat Empire, and is fresh off a run of performances of John Williams’s score for Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.
The upcoming symphony tour is a natural progression for the two brothers, given their initial musical training. As Oli explains, “Louis and I actually started as classical musicians. I’m actually a clarinet player first, so I went to the Conservatorium and studied classical clarinet, and our mum’s a classical musician: she’s a cellist and a pianist. So that’s kinda where we started! We only picked up guitar and piano maybe at the age of 12 or something, because we wanted to start singing – and it’s pretty hard to sing and play clarinet or trumpet at the same time.”
Even as their own performance style veered more into the pop-rock sound that informs much of their artistic output today, the siblings continued to listen to plenty of classical music and many other genres. Jazz and world music were common fixtures on the family stereo, though Oli admits their musical diet growing up featured a healthy dose of bands such as Kings of Leon and The Strokes.
“That’s what we always thought was cool, when we were younger,” he says.
Oli explains that the process of writing their songs is one which lends itself well to the symphonic form, admitting Lime Cordiale is not one of those bands that will just congregate in a garage and thrash something out in a couple of hours.
Instead, they carefully think about the desired harmonies of each song and how specific note choices will affect the overall shape and feel of their final product.
As he says, “I feel like maybe we write and record and produce in a bit more of a classical way.”
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I ask if the band’s follower base has previously expressed an interest in classical music, and whether there is a taste for this more orchestral style, which may have inspired the Australia-wide symphony tour.
“I think people, definitely our fan base, have good taste in music. Australian music, especially, is pretty good; it’s pretty diverse… Just the quality compared to other places you go around the world is so good, for the amount of people we have in Australia. I think that people are always looking for something a bit different, wanting to push their listening boundaries and tastes. This excites them.”
It is this flexibility in taste, and the kinds of sounds that Aussie audiences are open to experiencing, that places the Symphony Orchestras Tour on stable footing for a home audience.
Of the upcoming shows at Hamer Hall, Oli won’t give too much away but shares, “We have a bit of freedom to really give a different show. I think, when you’ve got everyone’s patience a little bit more – like, everyone’s sitting down and having a glass of red wine – you’re able to play one of the songs you don’t ever play.
You know, one of the B-sides people are always requesting but we don’t have enough time for at our festival sets… We’re just really trying to bring something as different as possible.”
Lime Cordiale will be performing with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra at Hamer Hall from 11-13 September 2025. Get your tickets here.
This article was made in partnership with the MSO.
