Catherine Breillat’s Last Summer is a remake of a 2019 Danish film called Queen of Hearts, May el-Toukhy’s feature about a woman who embarks on a sexual relationship with her teenage stepson. This adaptation follows the original closely, down to specific scenes and lines of dialogue. 

Sometimes an orchestral program proves to be meaningful in ways that were never intended when it was first devised. Such was the case last Thursday and Saturday, when the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra gave its first local outing since the onset of public and internal turmoil last month sparked by the orchestra’s management’s cancellation of a planned concerto performance on 15 August by Australian pianist Jayson Gillham.

In The Forever Wars: America’s unending conflict with itself – a searing account of the ways in which the seeds of Trumpism and the MAGA movement reach back to the first throes of American nationhood (reviewed for ABR by Timothy J. Lynch) – journalist Nick Bryant characterises the narrative by which America defines itself as ‘a story of unrivalled national success, shared values, common purpose and continual progress’. The American story was, and is, a ‘blurring of history and folklore … [that] didn’t ask too many troubling questions’; The United States was, and is, a nation that ‘lives and contests its history’ with an unrivalled level of ‘passion and ferocity’.

Opera Australia’s appearances in Melbourne have an almost wistful quality these days, given the present closure of the State Theatre. Perhaps OA should take a leaf out of the songbooks of Melbourne Opera and The Australian Ballet and consider hiring the ineradicable Regent Theatre on Collins Street, where AB will soon present Christopher Wheeldon’s new ballet, Oscar (dutiful balletomanes are sure to be dyeing their carnations and perming their locks in preparation for the Wildean opening night on 13 September).

Milk and Blood are the third and fourth instalments in Benjamin Nichol’s anthology series of works for solo performers. The preceding plays, kerosene and SIRENS, similarly played as a double bill at fortyfivedownstairs a year ago and were roundly lauded (this critic, sadly, did not see them).

On 4 September 2024, the classical world of music, and especially its Austro-Germanic heartland, will celebrate the bicentenary of Anton Bruckner’s birth. Australia’s homage to this symphonic Titan is relatively modest, though these months do include performances of his Ninth (Brisbane, QSO, Johannes Fritzsch), and Fourth (Melbourne and Geelong, MSO, Daniel Carter; Hobart, TSO, Eivind Aadland), along with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra’s four performances of the Eighth Symphony, under Simone Young. Her global reputation increasingly rides on dynamic interpretations of large later-Romantic works, by Richard Wagner, Gustav Mahler, Richard Strauss, as well as Bruckner.

How does a ten-day festival in Townsville (Gurambilbarra) in tropical Far North Queensland, with a line-up of thirty-five top musicians from Australia and across the world, go from strength to strength in a difficult economic climate? Maybe it’s because the Australian Festival of Chamber Music, with a track record of more than thirty years, is so much more than a music event.

Straddling broad comedy and genuine pathos, Uncle Vanya, first produced in 1899, is a very tricky play indeed. The main characters are mostly puffed up with delusion and fuelled by romantic fantasy. They use mordant self-deprecation alongside flights of fancy to express their dissatisfaction with their lot. The play encourages the audience to laugh at the evident gap between these characters’ vaulting sense of how special their lives ought to be relative to their actual lives of middling privilege, conducted in middling places.