Opera Queensland deserves great praise for opening their 2019 season with this lovely work. If there is one contemporary opera to make audiences realise that it is still a wonderful artistic form, and that we don’t always need Puccini, this is it.

The Mahler Chamber Orchestra is that rare beast among the world’s orchestras, a democratic institution. The players themselves founded it, and they choose their conductors. It has musicians from over 20 nations, and assembles for specific tours acoss Europe and the world.

Chamber Landscapes is a long weekend of chamber music held yearly as part of the Adelaide Festival at Ukaria, a cultural centre with an auditorium purpose-built for chamber music, quite possibly the best in the country.

I fell in love with Natalie Clein. Warm, unegotistical yet engaging, she spoke to the audience in the same vein as a simple remark attributed to her in the program, “The music is more important than me.”

Counting and Cracking is a profoundly affecting play, in which the lives of many people are actually or nearly destroyed by political decisions made both in Sri Lanka and in Australia.

After queuing for some time in the unseasonably cold evening air, we were let into St Francis Xavier’s cathedral, where our seats, unallocated, were narrow wooden pews from which our view of the performance area was partially obscured by a pillar. Par for the course for attending a concert in a...

What a delight these young musicians are.

This production is an overwhelming triumph. The conductor, Andrea Molino, understands the score so deeply that by the third scene the musical language seemed completely natural, embracing both lyricism and disjunction comfortably.

We were led to expect great things from Vivica, and we were not disappointed.

It is so hard to convince an audience which knows this piece inside out that they are listening to it for the first time, but that is what Barenboim achieved for me.