As the full ensemble plays an eclectic selection of music ranging from Bach and Shostakovich to grunge rockers Alice in Chains' and US protest singer Pete Seeger's , a film plays on a large screen behind it.

Largely created during a residency on the far northwest coast, 800km north of Perth, , says Thompson, "is not a movie that has just got a whole lot of waves in it" and Hong Kong audiences "should not think of it as a surf movie".

Hongkongers can decide for themselves when is performed on Saturday as part of the 41st Hong Kong Arts Festival.

Thompson says the Ningaloo reef is a "really incredible part" of the country and it was on the surf coast and rugged desert landscape of Gnaraloo Station that about 50 musicians, filmmakers and surfers staged an unorthodox residency for a fortnight in the middle of last year.

Camping out in punishing heat, they followed a routine of surfing and filming in the morning, jamming and developing new music in the afternoon. "The reef, unlike the Great Barrier Reef, comes right down onto the beach, you can swim off the beach," says Thompson. "I know they talk about the surfing side of it a lot," he says of the film component of the performance, "but a lot of it is landscape, it is an incredible country out there - super dry, blinding white sand dunes."

The film also focuses on the landscape by taking in part of an eventful road trip from the eastern states by some of the surfers.

After the coastal residency, the Australian Chamber Orchestra's training arm, ACO2, with its young emerging talents, along with Thompson and Tognetti, took the show on the road - although for its Hong Kong performances the full orchestra will play.

That first tour to Darwin and the isolated towns of Western Australia, culminating in a sell-out show at the Sydney Opera House, was attended by "a lot of people who have probably never been to see an orchestra before", says Thompson. It even included a concert in the shearing shed of Gnaraloo Station.

"There is some pretty intense modern music," says the cellist. "On the tour in Western Australia, these were things that audiences would not choose to go to and yet they absorbed it without blinking an eye."

The orchestra puts a strong emphasis on its national education programme and in the Western Australian town of Carnarvon local children wrote music for the show. The orchestra members who worked with them played their material and, after reworking by composer Iain Grandage, it was included in the show.

Two indigenous musicians also provided a connection with the land on which the residency took place: singer-guitarist Steve Pigram was thrilled at the chance to "showcase the majesty of Ningaloo", while didgeridoo player Mark Atkins, who has collaborated with Philip Glass and the London Philharmonic Orchestra, adds the unique desert sound of his instrument.

project may sound adventurous for a small orchestra and hardly in keeping with the word chamber in its name. But the ensemble, formed in 1975 and headed by Tognetti since 1989, is renowned not only for the high standard of its music that has drawn rave reviews on its more than 50 international tours, but also for its adventurousness.

Its repertoire spans six centuries and it is striving to both take its music to culture-deprived regional areas and to attract younger audiences as the traditional classical music concert-goers turn grey. Thompson, who also plays an electronic cello, says these have included collaborating with Australian singer-songwriter Katie Noonan and composer, keyboardist and guitarist Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead, and also a visual collaboration with Australian photo artist Bill Henson.

is the third part of a project initiated by Tognetti in 2007. It is described as "a spiritual sequel" to 2008's , made on King Island, north of Tasmania, then in 2010; both focused on the sea and fused music and film. "People ask why we do these projects and put these disparate elements together," says Thompson. "Richard says we hear more in the images and see more in the music."

There is some high-flown rhetoric in the publicity material, with the melding of surf, film and music presented as an almost mystical experience. The hundreds of hours of film footage of world-class surfers are compressed into 100 minutes which is described by director Mick Sowry as representing "people's relative impermanence against the vast Australian landscape".

Tognetti writes that the project "attempts, among other things, to bring a sense of existential awe and wonder to the hard-boiled" and that "the fertile release of our imaginations has been sparked by our fleeting encounter with this land and ocean and is transformed onto the screen … in an account more representative of a painter than a storyteller".

On a behind-the-scenes film clip on the orchestra's website, however, he says, simply: "To understand how we exist, lofty things like that."

Thompson is more prosaic - there is, he says, "something inherently beautiful and artistic about water". It's an artistry not quite evident in a photograph that captures him, arms akimbo, about to hit the water as a massive wave breaks over him.

So does this surfing prowess mean he will be not only playing his 1898 Swiss cello on stage, but riding his board in the movie screening behind him? "No, I don't think any of my surfing made the cut. That's okay because I am a much better cellist than I am a surfer."

The Reef