There are times when anyone might decide to throw in scanning the range of literature and art and music and just live inside one great figure’s work whether it’s Michelangelo or Shakespeare or Mozart. Well, from 17 to 28 June the nation will get the chance to hear three of Mozart’s greatest symphonies – the Paris, the Hafner and the Linz – performed in every major city with Richard Tognetti himself, that miracle of a violinist, directing his Australian Chamber Orchestra. These are some of the very greatest works of the man who is surpassed by no other figure of the history of music, if he is equalled and they exhibit that range of feeling and that supreme delicacy and ease of expressiveness of someone who could write the moody, sometimes dark comedy of Don Giovanni, the frolicking but also the spiritual wisdom of The Magic Flute, the unequalled solemnity of his last unfinished work the Requiem.

Mozart died in his mid-thirties though he was a child prodigy and we can’t even locate his grave. There is something thrilling as well as apt about a musician of such comprehensive culture doing this trio together as if the riches of the earth were his to command. In Melbourne punters will have Hamer Hall and the Recital Centre to choose between. Richard Tognetti taught Russell Crowe how to play the fiddle for Master and Commander and numbers the great photographer Bill Henson among his friends. He said during the height of the Covid pandemic that the damage to the world of Australian music was irreparable and however much you cherish your favourite recordings of these symphonies people should go to hear this everlasting music – music which can scarcely be equalled – live in the hands of a great orchestra.

Can we say the same for Bell Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet which opens in Melbourne on 14 June. The company’s interpretive achievements have always been varied but there’s no doubting the play which arguably has a particular affinity with Mozart because its spirit and style are so lyrical even though it remains a tragedy and Romeo speaks those terrible lines, ‘Death which hath sucked the honey of thy breath’ to the woman he can never know a lasting happiness with. Albert Finney – one of the great actors who came to prominence in the Sixties when lads from working backgrounds showed they could do Shakespeare like gods – said he thought the lovers should just run away together, the play’s vision was so tender that the tragic resolution was wrong. He did a matchless spoken-word recording of it on Caedmon with the great Claire Bloom as Juliet and Dame Edith Evans, the greatest Nurse who ever breathed or wheezed. What is clear is that if Shakespeare had only written Romeo & Juliet he would still be one of the greatest dramatists who ever lived. It was interesting to see that Olivia Hussey and Leonard Whiting who are the stars of Zeffirelli’s Sixties film the other week lost in their attempt to sue the producers on the ground that they were tricked into doing their snatch of a nude scene (her breasts, his buttocks). It did seem like an odd lawsuit given that they are each in their seventies and seem to be voicing their complaint for the first time. That film captures the breathless youth of the young couple and so in its way does Baz Luhrmann’s version, William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet. It would have been interesting to see Judi Dench’s stage Juliet for Zeffirelli. Here the perils of youth would have been matched by mastery of technique.

If you want to see an actress who will rivet your attention in a vehicle equal to her lavish talents try Gemma Arterton in Funny Woman, screening on Foxtel. Arterton came to prominence pretty dazzlingly in the Bond film Quantum of Solace where she played one Strawberry Fields (a name of Flemingesque suggestiveness) and she was superb in Stephen Frears’ Tamara Drewe. In Funny Woman she plays a provincial beauty queen who has been Miss Blackpool and somehow fumbles and flickers her way into becoming the lead in a British comedy series. It’s a dazzling performance on Arterton’s part, full of innocent pertness and wonderful expressiveness as she captivates the camera with the magic of what she can do with the lustrous glory of her eyes.

It’s from a Nick Hornby novel and this Northern girl in the sordor and sparkle of London’s big smoke has all the poignancy in combo with sweeping bits of hilarity that characterise all Hornby’s work of which About a Boy – with Hugh Grant and the then-child actor Nicholas Hoult – is the best known. Hornby has always known how to swerve in and out of hectic comedy and what tugs at the heart and Arterton is an extraordinarily good fit for his talents because she’s that kind of Marilyn Monroe-like comedienne who understands the thin ice of comedy and has a breathtaking command of timing and precisely how much excess and restraint the camera requires. Funny Woman is an ode to yesterday’s England – the 1960s England of high social mobility in combination with the hard residue of class consciousness. It’s grand to see a first-rate British cast supporting her with David Threlfall (remember him in Shameless?) as her stroke-prone dad, Rupert Everett as her balding agent, Alistair Petrie as the cold Establisment TV overlord who reluctantly recognises her talent and Arsher Ali who plays the producer and inhabits the role effortlessly. This is a beautiful piece of television, quiet and riotous at the same time.

The Rollings Stones have been in the news recently because Nick Broomfield is making a film about Brian Jones, the one who died in 1969 and led to the white-clad Mick Jagger reading Shelley’s Adonais in Hyde Park. There’s also the fact that Bill Wyman the bass guitarist who left the band in 1993 has written a book about his beloved Chelsea. There’s also the beguiling fact the the 79-year-old Jagger’s 36-year-old partner Melanie Hamrick (an American choreographer and former ballerina to whom he has given a sapphire-encrusted diamond ring) has just penned a Mills and Boon romance First Position and it’s porn. It’s strange, isn’t it, that almost all the Stones’ great songs were written in the Sixties.