The Australian Chamber Orchestra (ACO) turns fifty next month. On 21 November 1975, it played its first concert, at what was then the new Sydney Opera House. It will soon be back there – fifty years to the day – reminding us of its rude artistic health. In the lead up to this half-century celebration, the ACO has reprised the very popular ‘cinematic and musical odyssey’ Mountain, of which ACO Artistic Director Richard Tognetti was a composer, musical director, and joint initiator in 2017. This odyssey traces human interactions with high mountains, from trepidation to fascination; as the ACO puts it, high mountains hold us ‘spellbound’. The concert conceives of mountains both physically, as rock and ice, and symbolically, in our dreams and desires.

 In recent years, much fuss has been made about our foremost filmmakers’ apparent reluctance to set their films in the present day. Instead, they have flocked to the comforts of nostalgia, just as audiences have. 

As I made my way across town for the opening night of this year’s Melbourne International Jazz Festival (MIJF), I started to reflect on what it is that festivals like this do. Sure, they have a mandate to stage world-class events, generally beyond the remit of local venues or promotors. But there is more to it than that, isn’t there?

Titles are deliberately suggestive; they give you an indication of what’s to come. Continuum, the title of Sydney Dance Company’s latest offering, was appropriate, if not immediately resonant. Continuum features a triple bill of works from choreographers Stephen Page, Tra Mi Dinh and Rafael Bonachela.

The first filmed version of Mary Shelley’s gothic novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818) was the silent short Frankenstein (1910). Since then, more than four hundred versions of Shelley’s sutured-together golem have bestridden both the large and small screen. The most well known remains Universal Pictures’ Frankenstein (1931) and its sequel, Bride of Frankenstein (1935), pre-Code gothic horrors which implanted Boris Karloff’s pitiable Monster in the collective imagination forever after.

Daphne du Maurier’s novel Rebecca (1938) opens with one of the most iconic lines in literature (and, thanks to Alfred Hitchcock’s 1940 adaptation, one of the most iconic lines in cinema): ‘Last night I dreamed I went to Manderley again.’

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra’s program was a feast of late Romanticism preceded by an entrée from the mid-Romantic period. The opener was the Overture to Wagner’s Der fliegende Holländer (The Flying Dutchman), composed in 1841, when Mendelssohn, Chopin, and Schumann were at the height of their creativity.

It says something about the general mood in the United States at present that there is a sense of foreboding even in a town as ostentatiously laid back as Santa Fe. The locals are as friendly and eager to chat as ever, but inevitably the first question to emerge when I explain my accent is: ‘What do you Aussies think about our situation here?’ – an echo of the question that used to be asked of foreigners, seconds after they landed in Australia. This insecurity from a nation that used to be supremely indifferent to foreign opinion is a sign of the disquietude of the Trump era.

In his Broadway debut, sexagenarian Keanu Reeves has reunited with Alex Winter – his co-star from the Bill & Ted film trilogy (1989, 1991, 2020) – for Jamie Lloyd’s bold, minimalist production of Samuel Beckett’s classic. Hollywood stars seeking to prove their mettle on the stage can wrong-foot fans, opting for experimental fare, but this tendency is strangely fitting in Waiting for Godot, a play devoid of traditional exposition, in which confusion reigns supreme.