Two years ago, at its last Melbourne appearance, the Australian World Orchestra (AWO) performed Gustav Mahler’s last completed symphony, the Ninth. Ninety minutes long, that one work was the programme. For its return last Wednesday night, the AWO upped the ante. It presented well over two hours of music, and two Mahler symphonies, at its one-night Mahlerfest, with the strapline ‘Audacious. Exhilarating. Limitless.’

What image does Romeo and Juliet conjure for you? How high is your balcony? In Shakespeare’s play, vertical distance is a nod to the Petrarchan courtly love conventions that placed the lady on a pedestal. But, like a lot of conventions, Shakespeare calls up this one only to implode it.

Agnes (Eva Victor) is a high achiever. Barely out of her twenties, she is already a faculty member of the English department at a north-eastern US college. The red brick college sits with certainty in the landscape; so should Agnes, but something is off. The cottage where she lives – narrow and tall, just like she is – feels isolated. At night she hears the wind in the trees and checks the door, waiting for something. A reckoning never materialises.

What promised to be a memorable occasion on Friday evening – the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra’s appearance at the BBC Proms to conclude its European tour – descended into unseemly farce when a handful of agitators known as the Jewish Artists for Palestine staged a noisy protest and disrupted the concert.

Point to any one of the near 300 films at this year’s Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF) and you will likely find a luminary vision of imperfection. For three weeks Melbourne’s cinemas housed testaments to the incapable, the broken, and the mediocre.

‘First come, first served’ is just one of many clichés suggesting an event occurring first will probably trump similar events that have the misfortune to be ‘pipped at the post’! Such was the bitter experience of the Italian opera composer, Ruggero Leoncavallo (1857-1919) of I Pagliacci fame. 

Structured like a documentary but with the escalating tension of a tautly choreographed thriller, Late Shift follows one day in the working life of a nurse in a Swiss public hospital. Floria, expertly portrayed by Leonie Benesch, arrives at work mid-afternoon to discover that the third shift nurse has called in sick, leaving her and her colleague to tend to the two dozen patients on the ward with only the assistance of a student nurse.

Immensely popular in Mozart’s lifetime, the three-act singspiel Die Entführung aus dem Serail (Abduction from the Seraglio) presents a distinct problem for contemporary interpreters. Its Orientalist plot concerning the kidnapping of a European noblewoman and her maid by a Turkish pasha paints a portrait of the East, as the musicologist Daniel Sheridan has written, ‘as a sonic and scenic spectacle for Western spectatorship’. 

Since appearing on the Australian arts scene in 1989, Indigenous dance company Bangarra Dance Theatre has established itself as one of the nation’s most innovative and important performing arts collectives, creating and touring theatrical productions that deftly combine dance, music, poetry, culture, and design. Its latest production, the multidimensional Illume, is perhaps its greatest achievement yet.

Publicity notes for The Orchard outline the questions that provoked Pony Cam’s loose adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard (1904): ‘You’ve inherited a redundant cherry orchard, a crumbling climate, a failing economy and the final play written by Anton Chekhov. What will you salvage? Will you survive the adaptation?’ As far as this audience member is concerned, the answers to those questions are indisputable: ‘Nothing’ and ‘No’.