Music

Music review: Eclipse

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

Jessica Nicholas It's not every evening you enter a concert auditorium to the sound of crickets chirping. The auditorium is dimly lit, a subtle fragrance - sandalwood, perhaps? - hangs in the air.

Music

Music review: Quartets at Sunset 6 and 7

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

Clive O'Connell The Shanghai Quartet has put together some wide-ranging programs, including a couple of Australian works and calling on the services of local performers.

Theatre review: Room of Regret

Rating: 1.5 out of 5 stars

Cameron Woodhead A riff on Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, Room of Regret unfolds as a fragmented melodrama, peppered with scenes of horror.

Music

Music review: Polyphonic Spree

Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

Michael Dwyer Every fanfare is an explosion of fireworks, every chorus an eruption of sea spray on rocks and planets collide in each epic finale.

Music

Music review: Archie Roach: Into The Bloodstream

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

Michael Dwyer Archie Roach doesn't need an army to hold a room captive. Most of us have been pinned to the floor by his smoky voice alone at some point in the past 20 years.

Theatre review: Melbourne Festival Kids' Weekend

Reviewed By Cameron Woodhead An enjoyable and welcome addition to Melbourne Festival offerings but may need more ushers.

Music review: A Celebration Of Melbourne Ska

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

Reviewed by Brett Woodward Legendary musicianship and hidden history came together for extraordinary celebration.

Music review: Katia and Marielle Labeque

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

Reviewed by Martin Duffy This Irwin Kostal arrangement is an ambitious undertaking that mostly succeeds.

Recital review: Brahms and Wagner in Song

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

Reviewed by Michael Shmith It wasn't a thesis but perhaps they could have sacrificed some of the theory for the practical.

Music review: Wagner and the orchestra

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

Reviewed by Clive O’Connell Avid Wagnerites get a chastening taste of Opera Australia’s approaching Ring series.

Theatre review: All That Is Wrong

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

Reviewed by Rebecca Harkins-Cross Snippets of interviews with traders or climate change deniers overlap to become a cacophony.

Music

Music review: The Black of the Star

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

Jessica Nicholas As the lights dim, it is a voice that beckons us first. The voice gives us a poetic description of the rotating neutron stars.

When kids are rapt to perform in public

Sonia Harford Noah stomps about looking fearless, safe in his suit made of bubble wrap. So is the little boy shielding himself from harm, or merely dressing up like some kind of parcel-post astronaut?

Music review: Quartets at Sunset 4 & 5

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

Reviewed by Clive O’Connell Concluding cello pizzicato motif a breathtaking contrast to the interpretation’s heftiness.

Music

Music review: Quartets At Sunset 2 & 3

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

Reviewed By Clive O'connell The Attacca Quartet made John Adams' compendium the bookends of Tuesday's recital in this series.

Theatre

Theatre review: The Shadow King

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

Cameron Woodhead A daring reimagining of Shakespeare's classic in a modern setting, this is a King Lear that vindicates the indigenous relationship to the land.

Dance

Dance review: A Small Prometheus

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

Jordan Beth Vincent A Small Prometheus begins with the lighting of a candle. Normally a ritualistic action, in this instance it seems one of necessity.

Theatre

Theatre review: Teenage Riot

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

Rebecca Harkins-cross Teenage Riot is the second part of a trilogy exploring adolescence by Ontroerend Goed.

Music

Talented quartet shows its class

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

Reviewed By Clive O'connell A welcome feature of this year's festival is the resurrection of this excellent series: a recital each weekday in an accessible and acoustically clear venue.

Theatre

Acting for regime change in Europe's last dictatorship

ANNABEL ROSS Minsk 2011: A Reply to Kathy Acker examines sexual politics in the Belarussian capital and the fallout from protests after the dictatorial European state's 2010 elections.

Music

Genius of music lights way

PHILIPPA HAWKER Eclipse, the Melbourne Festival show from celebrated Mali musical duo Amadou and Mariam, takes place in pitch blackness.

Dance

Legendary dancer set to take flight

PHILIPPA HAWKER Sylvie Guillem continues to push the boundaries of her art and is here to show us how.

Music

Mystical double joy of Labeque sisters

BARNEY ZWARTZ The glamorous sisters live in a palace, explore all kinds of music and only fight over holidays.

Wang Bing

Keeping track as a system falls apart

JAKE WILSON Wang Bing's epic documentaries capture a side of China that is rapidly disappearing.

Visual arts

Moving frames of reality

Robert Nelson Film, which captures so many images, is itself an image: an iconic band of similar pictures on celluloid, perforated at the edges for sprockets. It's the motif that Tacita Dean uses at the end of the long gallery at ACCA, functioning like a portal or vertical altarpiece. Silent moving images quiver inside the filmic frame, sitting above one another like the narratives of a holy painting.

Music

Whimsical Briton set for cello spin Down Under

Harriet Cunningham Diminutive British cellist Steven Isserlis is famous for his wild hair, his gut strings and his impassioned music making.

Theatre

Tale without end, beginning or middle

STEPHANIE BUNBURY Life and Times is an exploration of the nature of stories, in this case that of a life in progress.

Film

Movie review: The Boy Castaways

Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars

GARRY MADDOX As an exercise in bold commissioning, Michael Kantor's The Boy Castaways is a success, but as a film it is not.

Reader reviews

Music

Music review: Olafur Arnalds

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

Reviewed By Michael Dwyer It took the boyish charm of Icelandic dream-weaver Olafur Arnalds to get us to strike the first chord.

Music

Music review: Fearless Nadia

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

Reviewed by Jessica Nicholas Integrating Indian classical instruments and Western notated music can be fiendishly difficult, but composer Ben Walsh and his band have created an ingenious, multi-hued soundtrack that seamlessly fuses the two traditions.

Comments

Theatre review: M+M

Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

Reviewed By Rebecca Harkins-cross At the beginning of M+M an actor picks up a continually ringing phone. ''I don't speak Russian,'' she tells the voice on the other end. It's a line spoken by Satan in Mikhail Bulgakov's Soviet satire The Master and Margarita, on which this production is loosely based, but here it gestures towards problems of translation and adaptation.

Dance review: The Rite Of Spring/Petrushka

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

Reviewed By Jordan Beth Vincent The Rite of Spring, with score by Igor Stravinsky and choreography by Vaslav Nijinksy, premiered in 1913. This vision of human sacrifice in the name of earthly fecundity was a turning point for modernity in dance and music.

Dance review: Sun

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

Reviewed By Chloe Smethurst Unafraid to tackle big themes, with driving beats and zeitgeisty, gutsy dance, Hofesh Shechter has been a favourite of the Melbourne Festival for several years.

Music review: The Cinematic Orchestra

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

Reviewed By Jessica Nicholas In the 14 years since Jason Swinscoe formed the Cinematic Orchestra, the British outfit has morphed from a cutting-edge, electro-jazz ensemble to a purveyor of lushly evocative soundscapes that have slipped into mainstream culture thanks to their frequent use in TV commercials.

Gig

Music review: Gurrumul - His Life and Music

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

Larry Schwartz Onstage at times Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu can seem painfully uncomfortable.

Music review: The Crowd

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

Reviewed By Clive O'Connell A fairly successful mingling of talents, chiefly those of filmmaker Jon Frank and the Australian Chamber Orchestra's Richard Tognetti, The Crowd premiered three years ago in Slovenia.

Theatre review: Brief Encounter

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

Reviewed By Cameron Woodhead Noel Coward's Brief Encounter started as a one-act play before it took flight in the 1945 David Lean film. Cornwall-based Kneehigh Theatre has drawn on both sources, as well as Coward's zippy songs, to create a slick and entertaining stage adaptation that's bigger on comedy than romance.

Theatre

Theatre review: In Spite of Myself

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

Reviewed by Cameron Woodhead Nicola Gunn's In Spite of Myself is a dizzying burlesque on avant-garde Melbourne Festival fare.

The Boy Castaways

Rogers true to typecast as reckless showman

ANNABEL ROSS Tim Rogers has a habit of singing the praises of his friends while taking himself down a notch or two.

In right hands, banned guns now weapons of mass entertainment

KYLIE NORTHOVER Disarming a Mexican city has given new meaning to the phrase 'instruments of death'.

Design

Breathing life into beautiful buildings

KYLIE NORTHOVER Buildings are secondary characters in a series of films about architecture.

Music

Gurrumul opens up his world

Dewi Cooke In Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu's life there are simple facts - of biology, of work, of daily existence - and then there is a reality that is more unfathomable.

Stage

Melbourne Festival taps the mainstream

KYLIE NORTHOVER Strong ticket sales and a more accessible program highlights festival opening.

Art

Epiphany on Somali life

Sonia Harford By 2050, Australians might know as much about Africans as they do about Italian or Vietnamese immigrants.

Dance

Going deep into the imagination

STEPHANIE BUNBURY Choreographer Michael Keegan-Dolan aims for sincerity in his Rite of Spring.

Wagner ran rings around tradition

BARNEY ZWARTZ The late 19th-century battle of the two composers pitted custom against innovation.

A blue-eyed blonde in Bollywood

STEVE DOW Australia's first icon of Indian cinema gets a modern makeover.

Lear takes on new territory

ANDREW STEPHENS The Shadow King is spoken in not only English, but also a rich Northern Territory creole.

Young voices telling it like it is

Cameron Woodhead Belgian theatre collective Ontroerend Goed has a reputation for stirring the pot.

Seeing the world with children's eyes

Sonia Harford Artist Wendy Ewald asks young people to document their lives, with startlingly creative results, writes Sonia Harford.

Backyard design

Art trams back on the tracks

ANNABEL ROSS The burgundy and gold of the 925 City Circle tram that we are used to seeing around Melbourne has been replaced with something even more conspicuous.

Independent theatre

The stage adventure

John Bailey As independent theatre-makers prepare to premiere works at the Melbourne Festival, they see audiences welcoming risk-taking and a new spirit of collaboration.

The Blues Brothers

On a mission from God, but not today

KARL QUINN It is one of the most successful musical comedies, but its director says it would never get made today.

Chamber music

10 years on the Attacca

Patricia Maunder Andrew Yee is at ease and and confident in Attacca Quartet's capacity to flourish.

John Landis

A rebel in the house

KARL QUINN His Animal House, Blues Brothers and Three Amigos were quirky megahits, but John Landis says modern Hollywood has lost its nerve.

Festival hub

Plain and simple but packed full of life

ANNABEL ROSS Melbourne Festival will celebrate the off the wall with a montage of music this year.

Brief Encounter

A brave encounter with Coward classic

STEPHANIE BUNBURY It's a brave director who would dare to tamper with David Lean's 1946 story Brief Encounter.

Theatre

Ugly mugs, monsters lurch into Malthouse

Sonia Harford The horror of Frankenstein has spawned a new female re-imagining of life's creation.

Sun

Sunny side of an angry man

STEPHANIE BUNBURY Choeographer Hofesh Shechter contemplates whether he has kept in touch with the things that matter.

Marco Fusinato

Postcard from New York

Andrew Purcell Soundings: A Contemporary Score has been presented as a debutante ball for sound art.

Stage

City's heritage takes festival centre stage

Kylie Northover The annual festival will for the first time use some of our best-loved heritage buildings.