Australian Arts

Sweeping exit

8 February 2025 9:00 am

It will be fascinating to see what Jamie Martín, the head of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, makes of Mahler’s Second…

It ain’t me, Bob

1 February 2025 9:00 am

It’s always a bit extraordinary how much an art form lives on the legends it has created. Everyone is looking…

Nothing like a Dame

25 January 2025 9:00 am

Art takes every possible shape and size. The exhibition of Japanese ukiyo-e prints (running at the National Gallery of Australia…

Pacific Paradise Lost

18 January 2025 9:00 am

Back in the childhoods of the baby boomers everyone seemed to know that Shakespeare was born in 1564 because there…

Thrillers

11 January 2025 9:00 am

It’s funny the preconceptions you have about the Christmas/New Year period. I hadn’t anticipated seeing Juror #2 the new Clint…

Summer Reading

4 January 2025 9:00 am

There are a thousand ways of celebrating the Christmas holiday that are culture specific but have a universal appeal. You…

Take it easy on a long, hot summer

14 December 2024 9:00 am

It’s a strange time, the summer holidays in Australia. Some people have riveting memories of Boxing Day tests, of Australian…

The most immodest thing

7 December 2024 9:00 am

So they’re having another go at removing the varnish and the accumulated dark oiliness and other accretions from that most…

Drunk in a midnight choir

30 November 2024 9:00 am

Biography can create the most heightened sense of drama. Just at the moment SBS On Demand is showing a streamer…

Such grandeur in the mind

23 November 2024 9:00 am

There’s always something breathtaking about the prices great art can fetch but the sale of Leonardo’s ‘Salvator Mundi’ at Christie’s…

Striving of the individual soul

16 November 2024 9:00 am

The Australian Ballet seems to have had a smash hit with Oscar. Not only did the ballet, choreographed by Christopher…

Narrative robbery

9 November 2024 9:00 am

So the silly season, the festive season when we celebrate the incarnation of the Good is looming, yet again, and…

The all-powerful hand of the director

2 November 2024 9:00 am

When that writer of spare French prose André Gide was asked who the greatest French poet was he replied, ‘Hugo,…

Such wild and tumultuous art

26 October 2024 9:00 am

Jonathan Mills’ opera Eucalyptus based on the superbly designed novel by Murray Bail has left audiences dazzled and rushing to…

A level of grandeur

19 October 2024 9:00 am

You can hardly complain about the state of classical music in this country at the moment. The Australian Brandenburg Orchestra…

Grave and terrible elements

12 October 2024 9:00 am

There’s something horrifying about Monsters, the Netflix streamer about the Menendez brothers who, back in 1989, murdered their mother and…

Distinctive ambitions

5 October 2024 9:00 am

It will be fascinating to see the retrospective of work by Jan Senbergs who died this year and who looms…

Maturity and tenderness

28 September 2024 9:00 am

So now it is spring and that carnival season with its promise of Melbourne Cups and AFL grand finals hits…

And then there was the voice

21 September 2024 9:00 am

It was at Cape Liptrap that the call came through. The setting was almost absurdly beautiful, the sea one way…

Tragedy and lighter things

14 September 2024 9:00 am

Noni Hazlehurst’s performance in Daniel Keene’s The Mother is a thing of wonder and terror, overwhelming in its power and…

Purring with cynical affection

7 September 2024 9:00 am

It’s one of those weird paradoxes of history that we think of the Elizabethan era as the zenith of our…

Zany streak of British humour

31 August 2024 9:00 am

The fact that Kip Williams is leaving the Sydney Theatre Company to stage The Picture of Dorian Gray with Sarah…

A man of incomparable beauty

24 August 2024 9:00 am

It was sad to see that great French actor Alain Delon had died the other day. He was a man…

The power of surprise

17 August 2024 9:00 am

You would think that Andrew Bovell, the man who wrote Lantana, would not be subject to the petty indignities of…

The standard of beauty

10 August 2024 9:00 am

Maxim Vengerov is touted as one of the world’s greatest violinists, the kind of musician who can fill Carnegie Hall…