Why does Taylor Swift feel like such a force of nature? She transfigures the economy of wherever she lands and if she doesn’t like what’s been done to her backlist she records her entire oeuvre again. Is it any wonder that this woman should be subjected – shamefully – to fabricated sex mock-ups when she comes across as such a supreme artefact, such a dynamised monument to the power of her own will. It’s not so long ago that her Millennial fans – people whose mothers swore by Joni Mitchell – saw Taylor Swift as an alternative independent artist and her apparent pop idiom as a kind of mask she wore to inflect the originality of her vision. Do they now have a revisionist version of this image of her? It’s possible. The high and mighty mystique of Bob Dylan’s persona outlasted the young genius who could write (and sing as if he had written) ‘Positively Fourth Street’ or – at the very edge of credibility – ‘Desolation Row’ or ‘Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands’. Is a supreme rock star a phenomenon her audience continues to reinvent? The other night we listened to Marianne Faithful singing ‘Working Class Hero’ in that weird theatrical haven St Anne’s Cathedral in Brooklyn, with a wan majesty way beyond John Lennon and if there was one thing she had not been, this posh convent girl who had played Ophelia to Nicol Williamson’s Hamlet at the Roundhouse, as well as in the film version, it was a working class hero.

Ophelia in her madness sings tortured versions of bawdy songs about Saint Valentine’s Day and the Australian Ballet are promoting their production of Alice in Wonderland as the ideal entertainment for those who want to see a supremely agile and artistically realised version of Lewis Carroll’s supremely wacko vision as a mutual lover’s treat but with that athletic precision which makes dance the highest form of dramatic movement.

We live in an age of crossovers and cross textures. People have been listening in awe to what the great Dolly Parton has done of and with Debbie Harry’s ‘Heart of Glass’. And then there’s Miley Cyrus who can make a cover version sound like a thing of originality and wonder.

The publication of The First Forty Years a book chronicling the decades in which Roslyn Oxley has been steadfastly promoting and preserving the art she believes in with such passion comes close to coinciding with that photographer extraordinaire Bill Henson getting a much deserved AO. Roslyn Oxley supported him through thick and thin and anyone who wants to see the record of the range of the art of the first rank she has promoted should get hold of the book. The book launch is 14 February and you can get a copy of the book from shop.roslynoxley9.com.au for $100.

If you’ve ever wondered what Mozart’s opera seria Idomeneo would be like on stage then the 20 February opening in Sydney of Lindy Hulme’s production – which has the Canadian tenor Michael Schade in the title role – should serve as some clue. The production at the Opera House is not likely to supplant Don Giovanni in anyone’s affections though both Pavarotti and Domingo recorded the title role of this very lofty story of moral dilemma and ancient furies.

It’s interesting that two of the original three tenors Plácido Domingo and José Carreras will be touring here in March. Pavarotti died in 2007 but Domingo with a less opulent sound and range is now exclusively singing baritone which everyone was amazed to see him take up when he sang the title role in The Barber of Seville. But he was always the most versatile of the great tenors not least because he sang the Wagner repertoire including Tristan, not just the standard Verdi/Puccini fare.

It was interesting, too, to be reminded the other week that he figures in the Mexican original cast of My Fair Lady (Mi bella dama) where he appears as one of the knockabout comrades of Doolittle the Dustman who accompanies him in ‘With a Little Bit of Luck’ (‘Con un Poquitin’). The original Mexican cast recording appeared in 1959 (the same year as the London cast) with the famous cartoon of Higgins (Rex Harrison) as Eliza’s puppetmaster and Shaw as his.

It’s fascinating to see that Quemar Press –who have provided a steady stream of French classics – are now bringing out an edition of a dramatic classic from seventeenth-century Mexico, Los Empeños de una Casa by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. This dramatic classic can be tasted at quemarpress.weebly.com/forthcoming.

It also will be interesting to see the musico-dramatic upshot of Notre Dame, a dramatic reanimation of the history of the great French cathedral not so long ago beset by fire. The director of the Australian Brandenburg Orchestra, Paul Dyer,is bringing music by Lully and Von Bingen (among others) and there is a dramatic narrative script by the director, Alana Valentine, so it should be an intriguingly constructed work. On top of this the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra has just appointed a new director of programming Andrew Moore – late of the Edinburgh Festival – who will be working hand in glove with Jaime Martín and who sounds like a very good bet.

There’s also the cheering news that Tom Hughes, Malcolm Turnbull’s father-in-law, turned 100 the other week. Hughes, the brother of the great art critic Robert Hughes, was attorney-general under Gorton. When he feared the assault of anti-Vietnam demonstrators he defended himself with a cricket bat. When Hal Porter decided to sue a reviewer he was told Tom Hughes was his only chance: he compared him to Robert Donat in Rattigan’s The Winslow Boy – and he won. But when his sometime opposite number, former Labor attorney-general Lionel Murphy, was accused of acting corruptly on the High Court, Hughes sought leave to appear before the bar of the Senate. He snapped to a journalist, ‘I’m not thinking of my client’s interests. I’m thinking of the state of justice in this country.’ And when Sir Maurice Byers, the solictor-general of Australia, walked into court to appeal the verdict against Murphy, Thomas Eyre Forrest Hughes was there as his junior in an extraordinary act of solidarity. When Gorton died Tom Hughes delivered a thundering denunciation of Malcom Fraser from the pulpit of St Andrew’s Cathedral because he believed he had betrayed Gorton. He described his old comrade in arms in Chaucer’s words as ‘a perfect gentle Knight’.