German baroque composer Christoph Gluck’s Orpheus & Eurydice presents several challenges for the contemporary opera director. There are only three characters, for a start. When the story opens, Orpheus/Orfeo (Iestyn Davies) has already lost his bride, Eurydice (Samantha Clarke), to a snake bite on their wedding day. She has been taken to the Underworld, to a paradise within hell.

There was a culminative air about the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra’s last subscription concert for the year. Branded ‘New Worlds’ in order, no doubt, to draw attention to its inclusion of Dvořák’s beloved Symphony No.9 From the New World, at its heart was the Australian premiere of Deborah Cheetham Fraillon’s Treaty. Cheetham Fraillon’s successful five-year appointment as MSO First Nations Creative Chair draws to a close at the end of the year and Treaty appears in the shadow of the passing of the Statewide Treaty Bill 2025 (it received Royal Assent on November 13). Among other things, this bill paves the way for the First Peoples’ Assembly of Victoria to become a permanent, legislated body.

In the same year that Apple TV’s series The Studio (2025) took a scalpel to modern-day Hollywood – a Hollywood beset by pandemics, wildfires, union action, sparring tech barons, punitive politicians, and the creeping, existential threat of artificial intelligence – here comes Noah Baumbach’s Jay Kelly, along with its hero Jay Kelly (George Clooney). Both film and protagonist are handsome, genial, and seemingly apolitical – throwbacks to a different, simpler, no doubt more naïve time.