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Welcome to ABR Arts, home to some of Australia's best arts journalism. We review film, theatre, opera, music, television, art exhibitions – and more. To read ABR Arts articles in full, subscribe to ABR or take out an ABR Arts subscription. Both packages give full access to our arts reviews the moment they are published online and to our extensive arts archive.
Meanwhile, the ABR Arts e-newsletter, published every second Tuesday, will keep you up-to-date as to our recent arts reviews.
Recent reviews
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.
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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.
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Opportunities to hear Hector Berlioz’s song cycle Les Nuits d’été (Summer Nights) – orchestrated or not – are sadly rare in Melbourne, probably because of the interpretative challenges it presents for the soloist. Swedish mezzo-soprano Katarina Karnéus sang it with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra in 2003, and soprano Camilla Tilling, another Swe ...
The True History of the Life and Death of King Lear and his Three Daughters
On the wooden floorboards of a bare and slightly raised stage, a king draws a chalk circle: perfect, empty, unbroken. Behind him, twelve empty seats wait and watch. Before him, the audience.
The empty circle is Lear’s kingdom, but it is also a diagram of a disastrous decision to carve up his family alongside his lands and wealth. The circle haunts th ...
To judge by much of this Melbourne Theatre Company (MTC) production of Much Ado About Nothing, you might think that Shakespeare had written not a tragicomedy but a farce – and a poor farce at that. Director Mark Wilson – renowned, the program notes tell us, for his ‘radical’ adaptations of Shakespeare – pushes so hard at the comedy buttons that ch ...
The Australian Chamber Orchestra (ACO) turns fifty next month. On 21 November 1975, it played its first concert, at what was then the new Sydney Opera House. It will soon be back there – fifty years to the day – reminding us of its rude artistic health. In the lead up to this half-century celebration, the ACO has reprised the very popular ‘cinematic and musical odyssey’ Mountain, of which ACO Artistic Director Richard Tognetti was a composer, musical director, and joint initiator in 2017. This odyssey traces human interactions with high mountains, from trepidation to fascination; as the ACO puts it, high mountains hold us ‘spellbound’. The concert conceives of mountains both physically, as rock and ice, and symbolically, in our dreams and desires.
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In recent years, much fuss has been made about our foremost filmmakers’ apparent reluctance to set their films in the present day. Instead, they have flocked to the comforts of nostalgia, just as audiences have.
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