With unrelenting cheerfulness, bright orange lights shine on a simple set: a row of straight-backed chairs, a tall flower display, and a painting of an elderly woman, prominently displayed. Are we about to witness a funeral? Indeed we are. Slowly, painfully, the ambulant residents ...

In recent years George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (first published in 1949) has twice been returned to bestseller lists around the world – in the wake of the United States National Security Agency’s global surveillance scandal, and following Donald Trump Counselor Kellyanne ...

Canadian-born pianist Angela Hewitt is well known to Australian audiences through her regular visits and her memorable performances and recordings of Johann Sebastian Bach’s keyboard repertoire. Her legendary performances of Bach, encompassing superb playing and ...

German playwright Frank Wedekind (1864–1918) was one of those rare artists whose work lies at the nexus of several major movements – in his case expressionism, modernism, and epic theatre – while never quite conforming to strict definitions of what those movements have come to mean ...

Co-Opera’s Eugene Onegin and Various People’s Orpheus Underground, both of which played in Adelaide in early May, provided a study in contrasts. Tchaikovsky’s great opera (first performed in 1879) has toured to the eastern states and country South Australia, an ambitious undertaking ...

Such was the international success of this double bill that both works were performed together at the Princess Theatre in Melbourne in September 1893 – Pagliacci less than sixteen months after its world première in Milan. Impresario George Musgrove even secured the original Canio ...

In this fortnight's Update: Vale Michael Gurr, The Pearlfishers and Patrick Nolan at OperaQ, Shrine at fortyfivedownstairs, Sydney Writers' Festival, Isaac Drandic, Aardman Animations at ACMI, Rory Jeffes, Madman acquires Garage Entertainment, and a giveaway from fortyfivedownstairs ...

After the recent appearance of Joshua Bell and the Academy of St Martin in the Fields in Sydney, the next visitors to the Sydney Opera House in the World Orchestras Program were the Hong Kong Philharmonic under conductor Jaap van Zweden, with violinist Ning Feng ...

In the last seventy days of Vincent van Gogh’s short life, he painted seventy paintings. His intense life as an artist lasted for a single decade, from the age of twenty-seven to thirty-seven. Before that he had been, variously, a trainee preacher, an evangelist to miners, a labourer, and an ...

Vincenzo Bellini – fresh from the success of I Capuleti e Montecchi in Venice – spent the July and August of 1830 on Lake Como biding his time. He was struck by the folk songs of the female workers at the textile mills as they made their way home. These idylls were to flavour his ...