Friday night’s Sydney Symphony treat at the Opera House’s Concert Hall was a sold-out affair. The audience sizzled with expectation at the prospect of hearing a ‘world celebrity’. Daniil Trifonov was in town ‘performing Rachmaninov’, as the informative program’s cover proclaimed. But which Rachmaninov? Well, it was Trifonov’s favourite among Rachmaninov’s four concertos: the Fourth.

Picasso/Asia: A Conversation, at M+ in Hong Kong, is simply splendid. It is innovative: not a standard chronological parade of ‘masterpieces’, but a rich and probing interrogation of the most famous European artist of the twentieth century, paired with an intelligent consideration of the impact of his work in Asia, and how it connected with Asian artists.

The pairing of two Australian soloists – Siobhan Stagg (soprano) and Kristian Bezuidenhout (fortepiano) – in top form with one of the world’s finest period music ensembles, and in an all-Mozart program, was always likely to be a winning concert combination, and so it proved to be. This second of two Melbourne concerts by the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra during their current tour was delivered with consummate style to a delighted and near-capacity audience at the Melbourne Recital Hall.

Is Henry V Shakespeare’s worst play? No, that unhappy honour goes to The Taming of the Shrew, an anti-comedy that grows more rancid with each passing year.

Ever since its beginnings in the late sixteenth century, opera has been preoccupied with death. Illness, murder, and suicide stalk countless libretti, from Mozart’s Don Giovanni and Puccini’s Tosca to Berg’s Wozzeck and Mazzoli’s Breaking the Waves. To the litany of horrific fates which have historically befallen the medium’s protagonists – stabbings, immolations, death by snake bite, poison and toxic mushroom, to say nothing of various wasting diseases and literal descents into hell – can now be added that most contemporary and shocking of demises: death by mass shooter.