To place the Australian World Orchestra (AWO) in a truly global context, and before I deal with Wednesday night’s triumphant concert in Hamer Hall, I must briefly expand my terms of reference.

For the casual moviegoer unconcerned by matters of auteurship, it can still come as something of a shock to learn that the person behind the original Mad Max trilogy (1979–85), as well as its decade-defining follow-up, Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), also brought us the madcap animal antics of Babe: Pig in the City (1998) and the all-singing, all-dancing penguin colony of Happy Feet (2006) and Happy Feet 2 (2011). George Miller has one of the most eclectic oeuvres in modern cinema, but all his films are defined by a rich, seemingly limitless vein of imagination, as well as by the technical and aesthetic mastery necessary to mine it. Whether dabbling in live-action or 3D animation – whether wrangling penguins, pigs, or eighteen-wheeler ‘War Rigs’ – Miller is a storyteller first and foremost. It stands to reason that his latest film is a story about stories themselves: where they come from, what they mean to us, and what their place is (if any) in the modern world.

Few opera composers were more prolific than Gaetano Donizetti, and 1833 proved to be no exception in his relatively short career, with four separate premières in as many cities, culminating in Lucrezia Borgia, first heard at La Scala on 26 December. That season ran for thirty-three performances. The opera went on to become a popular vehicle for prima donnas (some nearing the end of their careers). Melbourne Opera’s reliably good program informs us that Lucrezia had its Australian première at Melbourne’s Theatre Royal in 1855 and remained popular for forty years, becoming Donizetti’s most performed opera in Victoria after Lucia di Lammermoor.

Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem was written for the consecration of the new Coventry Cathedral in 1962, after the old cathedral had been destroyed by German bombing raids in 1940. He dedicated the work to four friends, three of whom were killed while on active service during World War II, and the fourth of whom survived the war but later committed suicide. As an avowed pacificist who had been a conscientious objector during the war, Britten took the opportunity to compose a work combining the traditional Latin Requiem Mass with the anti-war poetry of Wilfred Owen: a fellow pacificist (and fellow gay man) who had served as a lieutenant in World War I and who was killed on the Western Front one week before the Armistice was declared in 1918.

Australian playwright Suzie Miller, a mainstay of independent stages both in Australia and overseas, is having something of a breakthrough year. Two of Miller’s play are having their mainstage premières – Anna K and RBG, Miller’s ode to American jurist Ruth Bader Ginsberg (Sydney Theatre Company, October–December) – and her Griffin-award-winning play Prima Facie (2019) has been a sell-out smash in London’s West End and broadcast around the world as part of the prestigious NT Live initiative of Britain’s National Theatre.

This month Sydney is host to two productions inspired by Robert Louis Stevenson’s novella Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1888). The first, from Sydney Theatre Company, signals director Kip Williams’s return to the Roslyn Packer Theatre following the success of his 2019 production, The Picture of Dorian Gray. The second, from director Hayden Tee, offers a subversive revival of the much-maligned 1990 ‘gothic thriller musical’ Jekyll and Hyde by Frank Wildhorn and Leslie Bricusse at Hayes Theatre Co. ‘Man is not one but two’, Stevenson famously writes ...

It’s easy to forget that it has only been only six years since Jordan Peele’s directorial début. Get Out (2017) was both a strikingly confident addition to the horror genre and a remarkably influential step-forward for black representation on film, instantly making Peele a household name. Now, his third and latest picture, Nope, is backed by a $60 million budget. This makes it his biggest project yet, costing more than three times as much as his previous film, Us (2019). Unsurprisingly, he delivers a spectacle that would make even Steven Spielberg proud.

Every other day there seems to be a news story about the largesse with which public money is dispensed to private schools while the public education system falls further into disrepair and dysfunction. As reported in February 2022 by the Guardian, recent analysis by Save Our Schools shows that between 2009 and 2020 government funding for independent schools increased by $3,338 a student compared with just $703 more per student for public schools.

Over the years, the demise of the solo art song recital has often been predicted, yet the format lives on, sometimes reflecting new approaches and variations on tried and tested practices, but generally remaining within the parameters of a singer and pianist in evening wear on an empty stage. It evolved from informal house concerts in Europe in the late eighteenth century, probably reaching its ‘standard’ setting in the mid to late nineteenth century in the German-speaking lands in a form known as the Liederabend (song evening) ...

At drinks following the first performance of this sold-out run of Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 2, conductor Simone Young chatted to mezzo-soprano Michelle DeYoung, the latter’s hoarse voice alarming the two of them. ‘We need to call Debbie,’ Young told a colleague, wary of what the morrow would bring. ‘Right now!’