Tabla de contenidos para October 2025 en Limelight

Steve Dow Steve Dow is the 2020 Walkley Arts Journalism Award recipient for his essay, profile and reportage portfolio. The Melbourne-born, Sydney-based arts writer’s work also appears in The Saturday Paper, Guardian Australia, The Monthly, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, Meanjin, Art Guide and Vault. Elissa Blake Elissa Blake is a Sydney-based journalist and editor. She learned the trade at The Age, edited Australian Rolling Stone magazine and has written for mastheads including The Sydney Morning Herald, Harper’s Bazaar and Guardian Australia. She currently works at the University of Sydney. Jane Albert Jane Albert is a Sydney-based arts writer who has spent two decades covering theatre, dance, the visual arts, music and film for publications including The Weekend Australian, the Australian Financial Review, Good Weekend, Broadsheet (Sydney) and Vogue…

Danny Mulvany loved the heat, evident in his tanned, leathery skin. The Ten Pound Pom from Nottingham immigrated to the red dirt of Derby in the West Australian Kimberley as a young man, then raised a family in remote coastal Geraldton, 400 kilometres north of Perth, never wanting to move back to England. Taking a labourer’s job with Western Australia’s Main Roads Department, Danny travelled in his old ute, which smelled of earth and toil, sometimes plucking his eldest child, Kate, out of primary school from the age of six onwards. Together, they would head northeast to the dusty desert of Yalgoo or southeast to the wildflowers and wheat of Mingenew, wherever his job took him. “He would just let me roam free in the area while he was working…

When I was growing up in Indonesia, society had a vastly different attitude towards people with disability. We were the ‘other’. Many of the words associated with disability in Indonesia translated to ‘damaged’ or ‘impaired’. Many were used as insults. Even the politically correct version emphasised what we lived without – sight, hearing or intellect. Despite this, to be successful meant we were expected to overcome barriers arising from our disability. We should also uplift and inspire. Conforming to these expectations was the price for being different. It was as a blind adult and artist that I started to query why it was acceptable for society to put up barriers to keep us out in the first place. In 2022, against this backdrop of growing awareness, I joined members of…

Ashwood Publishing, PB, 358pp, $46.66, ISBN 9781763692107 High-flying go-getters need to be cautioned before reading this memoir. Michael Atherton’s boundless energy, enthusiasm, professional versatility and musical adventuring spring off the pages, leaving the reader humbled and maybe achievement-fatigued. In his long career, Atherton has been a composer, performer, music therapist, occasional poet, lecturer and head of faculty at Western Sydney University. He has also produced and contributed to countless CDs and authored seven books including the enjoyable and historically enlightening A Coveted Possession: The Rise and Fall of the Piano in Australia. He is one of those maddeningly brilliant practitioners who not only plays multiple instruments but switches convincingly between different genres, including crossing the divide between classical and popular styles. As he says, “I don’t subscribe to dichotomies such…

CLASSICAL MUSIC Musica Viva Australia: Trio Isimsiz Trio Isimsiz (‘anonymous’ in Turkish) was formed in 2008 by pianist Erdem Mısırlıoğlu, violinist Pablo Hernán Benedí and cellist Edvard Pogossian after meeting at the Guildhall School in London. Celebrated from the Aldeburgh Festival to Copenhagen’s Tivoli Concert Hall, they now embark on their first national tour with Schubert’s Piano Trio No. 1, Brahms’ Piano Trio and the Australian premiere of Francisco Coll’s Piano Trio, commissioned for the trio and described by The Strad as “ear-beguiling and starkly inventive”. Jansson J. Antmann 30 September – 12 October, venues in Perth, Adelaide, Canberra, Melbourne, Sydney, Newcastle, Brisbane and Armidale, musicaviva.com.au Australian Brandenburg Orchestra: Water Music A meditation on the spiritual, cultural and environmental significance of water, this program pairs Handel’s Water Music with the…

It’s a mild August morning in the English city of Colchester, some 80 kilometres northeast of London. Nicholas McCarthy is alone in his studio, a sunny outbuilding separate from his home. The walls are lined with scores and books. A black baby grand piano dominates the room. He’s already a few hours into his workday, he tells Limelight. “I used to be a late riser, but now I’m usually in here by eight, coffee in hand, and have done an hour of practice before most people have got started.” That physical separation of work and home – even if it’s only by the length of an English suburban garden – is essential, McCarthy says. For years, when his piano dominated the lounge of a smaller house, the instrument loomed too…

Morgan Pearse is looking forward to being “a bit of a lad”. The London-based baritone, who was born and raised in Sydney, is in Australia for the rest of the year. Whilst here, one of his appearances will be as Mercutio in Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette for State Opera South Australia. “I’ve been singing so many awful characters recently, like Scarpia in Tosca, Enrico in Lucia [di Lammermoor] and Achilla in Giulio Cesare, none of them very nice, that it will be great to play a guy who is a bit more straightforward,” he says. Pearse bowls up on his pushbike to meet me in a quiet suburban London square. It’s July, and he’s had an intensive day, rehearsing Enrico in Lucia di Lammermoor for Opera Holland Park. Yet, there…

This drama by director and screenwriter Maura Delpero is set during World War II, but high up in the Alps of Northern Italy, in the village from which this arresting film takes its name, the conflict feels distant – something gossiped about by old men in the local tavern. Were it not for the presence of an Italian army deserter hiding out in a ruined barn, and the occasional aircraft flyover, you might not know the war was on at all. In fact, you might not immediately grasp that this story is set in the 20th century, such are the unchanging rhythms and demands of rural life lived at the snow line. Delpero focuses on one family. Patriarch Cesare Graziadei (Tommaso Ragno) is the village schoolmaster, a respected figure who…

Nick Wales first heard Rrawun Maymuru perform at the 2011 National Indigenous Music Awards (NIMA). “He sang the opening manikay (traditional song) and I had shivers going all down me. From that moment, I was drawn to working with him,” says Wales, an acclaimed composer of electronic classical music. Maymuru comes from a long line of Yolŋu songmen from the Maŋgalili clan in Yirrkala in North-east Arnhem Land and is the grandson of Dr Yunupingu. He and Wales met when Maymuru debuted his live solo set at the 2016 Homegrown Festival at the Sydney Opera House. The following year, they collaborated for the first time when Sydney Dance Company commissioned them to write a piece for Rafael Bonachela’s work Ocho. Their composition, Nyapillilngu (Spirit Lady), went on to win a…

New Australian musicals are unusual enough. But a revival of an Australian musical presented in a brandnew production only a few years after its premiere is decidedly rare. So, Laura Murphy was surprised and delighted when Shake & Stir Theatre Co approached her about staging a new version of her musical The Lovers at the Queensland Performing Arts Centre. She admits to being even more “shocked” when commercial producer John Frost decided to join forces with Shake & Stir and bring the production to Sydney. The Lovers was premiered by Bell Shakespeare in 2022. At that point, Murphy – “a Shakespeare nerd” after playing Flute in a high school production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream – had been working on the show for 12 years, having begun writing it while…

This month, State Opera South Australia will present Roméo et Juliette in a brand-new co-production with West Australian Opera and Irish National Opera, and Artistic Director Dane Lam can’t hide his excitement at tackling Gounod’s score. “It straddles this path between Meyerbeer and Bizet,” he tells Limelight. “There’s great lyricism and evocative use of the orchestra to portray the intimate inner world of Roméo and Juliette.” Bringing the star-crossed lovers to life are American-born tenor Kyle Stegall and Australian soprano Siobhan Stagg, who is making her role debut as Juliette. “This will be the first time Siobhan and Kyle sing together, and I think it will be magical – a musical match made in heaven,” says Lam. “Kyle is a stylish performer at the forefront of historically informed singing and…

RADIO *All times local Nomadic Nostalgia Fritz Hart moved from England to Australia and then on to America in search of musical employment. In his colourful Idyll for violin and orchestra Hart looks back to the bygone era of English pastoralism. 1 October, 1pm, 3MBS, 3mbs.org.au Almost a Masterpiece Mozart abandoned his Singspiel Zaide to compose Idomeneo, so we have no idea if the titular heroine ended up with her lover, the slave Gomatz, or the evil Sultan Suliman. Take a listen to the music Mozart left us, but be prepared: you’ll be left hanging. 2 October, 8pm, 4MBS Classic FM, 4mbs.com.au Korngold vs the Critics Erich Korngold found fame as a Hollywood film composer, prompting the musical elite to find fault with his concert music. Fortunately, this snobbery has…

When I was seven, my parents asked my school to teach me the accordion as they thought it would help me concentrate on my academic work. The music teacher thought it would be too heavy for a young girl, so she put me into a guitar group she was starting. To be honest, when my parents told me about the guitar group, I didn’t know what a guitar was, but my first teacher was very good, encouraging the kids to enjoy playing it, so I fell in love with the guitar pretty much immediately. At first, I was playing it as a hobby, but to cut a long story short, I was told by the foreign guitarists I met at festivals that I had a talent and could be an…

I was born in Madrid, but my mum is from Barcelona - we’re both Catalan - and we moved there when I was four. My mum loved going to the theatre, so I used to go with her to the Liceu and listened to her music. One of my first musical memories is Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet overture – could you imagine me listening to the Prokofiev at that age?! As a young dancer, I was an extra in a lot of operas. I remember being mesmerised by the sound of Ruggero Raimondi’s voice. The first time I heard him sing was when we did Andrea Chénier and I was literally a metre away from him. We also did Massenet’s Don Quichotte and Carmen, which had a huge impact on…