A week in Paris (Billy Strayhorn’s moody panacea) gave ABR Arts a perfect opportunity to savour some of the city’s abundant musical life. We’ll start with an important revival at the Opéra National de Paris, performed at the Bastille.

Decades ago, during what we might now regard, a little wistfully, as the heyday of the national company, the operas of Leoš Janáček (1854–1928) were fixtures in The Australian Opera’s repertoire. No more! So it was good to hear one of the four great operas he wrote after his sixty-fifth birthday: Vĕc Makropulos (rendered in English on the Paris Opera’s website as The Makropulos Case, not the customary Makropoulos Affair).