Michael Shmith

Mar 6, 2025 | australianbookreview.com.au | Robyn Archer |Michael Shmith |John Allison |Peter Tregear

These are challenging times for Australia’s national opera company, and not just because many critics and operamanes question whether Opera Australia is in fact remotely ‘national’ in terms of programming. Since 2020 the company has recorded consecutive operating losses. Recently, it lost its artistic director (Jo Davies) and its CEO (Fiona Allan). Reviews of some of its 2024 productions were lukewarm at best.

Apr 29, 2024 | australianbookreview.com.au | Michael Shmith |Arts Highlights

This attractive and fascinating volume is billed as ‘the first illustrated book on the 1948 Old Vic tour’, and, sure enough, it is jammed from stage-left to stage-right with scores of images – especially of the eternally photogenic two superstars who led the tour. Not among them is one particular photograph – more of a snapshot, really, just 6 x 4½ inches in 1948 measurements. It was taken on the night of 17 May 1948 at a post-performance party at a family home in Melbourne’s St Kilda.

Mar 25, 2024 | australianbookreview.com.au | Michael Shmith |Arts Highlights

That doctors aren’t supposed to become incurably ill is something their patients might say, and about as useless as declaring that dentists are forbidden from contracting toothache or that undertakers should live forever – seeing other people out, not themselves.

Feb 7, 2024 | australianbookreview.com.au | Michael Shmith |Arts Highlights

Given the unalloyed delight of hearing the English pianist Paul Lewis’s magnificent traversal of the late sonatas of Schubert, it is hard to believe that these pieces, now so central to the piano repertoire, were once so peripheral, so neglected, as to be considered at worst non-existent or, at best, gemütlich items of curiosity. The latter view was neatly encapsulated by the great Schubert virtuoso, Alfred Brendel.

Sep 6, 2023 | australianbookreview.com.au | Michael Shmith |Arts Highlights

Breaking News: The Golden age of Graham Perkin Scribe, $59.95 hb, 536 pp Biography The editor who defined The Age In May 1981, I joined The Age, where, more or less, I have stayed put. On my first night one of the news subeditors said, ‘Let’s have a drink’. Whereupon he led me away from the news desk, along the scrofulous green carpet, past the ramshackle assortment of desks and typewriters, and straight into the men’s room. Fleet Street used to have a bar, behind St Bride’s Church, called...