One of the great strengths of the Mystery Road series has been its ability to distil complex social relationships, with deep historical roots in racism, into compelling dramatic narratives. Mystery Road: Origin Season 2 continues this work of taking a scalpel to aspects of Australian society that hide uncomfortable truths but, unlike the previous seasons, in which Detective Jay Swan confronts a violent criminal underbelly, this season shifts focus to explore the more ‘respectable’ violence embedded in the health and welfare systems, in a country town where First Nations residents live alongside those who were instrumental in enforcing the policy of assimilation.

Perhaps more than any other composer, Dmitri Shostakovich’s music is a window onto his life and times. His Symphony No. 10 in E minor, Op. 93, completed in 1953, is generally seen as his response to the death of Joseph Stalin months earlier. Shostakovich said in his memoir, Testimony (1979), that it was about Stalin, though he had been working on it prior to Stalin’s death.

In her classic work of speculative fiction ‘The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas’ (1973), Ursula Le Guin forces us to ask what – or who – we are prepared to sacrifice in order to build our utopias. Le Guin describes Omelas as a place of great beauty and happiness. A place that is joyous and ordered, that needs no kings. The people of Omelas are ‘mature, intelligent, passionate’, and there is no grief or misery in their lives. Crucially, Le Guin invites her readers to contribute to the imagining of this utopia, thereby implicating us in the substantial cost of building and maintaining it. As the story reveals, the bliss of Omelas is founded on the suffering of a starved and neglected child locked in a ‘foul-smelling’ underground closet. The child begs and screams, ‘Please let me out. I will be good!’

You can make the case that Othello’s handkerchief is the most consequential prop in all of Shakespeare. Yorick’s skull and Macbeth’s floating dagger are more iconic, but neither is integral to the action of the plays in which they feature. The handkerchief, on the other hand, really is the whole of the tragedy of Othello.

Look out – here comes Cassandra. Her hair falls long and loose with a braid running through it: part classical heroine, part bohemian drifter. She could be a warrior maiden or the lead singer of an indie rock group. Fake-vintage band T-shirt, gold metallic miniskirt cut like the flaps of ancient armour, and the detail that unsettles the image: a large shopping bag she schleps from scene to scene.

Had Mozart not succumbed to a streptococcal infection in 1791, the year might have been remembered as his annus mirabilis. In less than a year, the composer produced a remarkable sequence of works: two concertos – one for clarinet, the other for piano – the motet Ave verum corpus in D major, and two operas. Both of the operas are firmly embedded in the modern repertoire, but it is not the opera seria La clemenza di Tito (The Clemency of Titus) that was immediately and permanently embraced by audiences, but its near-contemporary, the singspiel Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute).

It started with a handful of players amid a sea of empty chairs. The vacant seats, laid out for the much larger forces needed later in the Sydney Symphony Orchestra’s all-Strauss program, lent an unplanned poignancy to the performance of Metamorphosen, a work written in the dying months of World War II. One could imagine this to be a lament for the countless numbers who died, symbolised by the unfilled places on stage. In fact, it was the loss of Germany’s cultural patrimony, through the destruction of opera houses and other institutions in Allied bombing raids, which particularly affected Strauss. Metamorphosen mourns the passing of a world to which he had devoted his life, both as conductor and composer.

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.