Limelight

Independent, in-depth and intelligent, Limelight offers Australia's finest coverage of music, arts and culture. Inside each issue, we invite you to take a deep dive into at least four main features exploring the music, opera, theatre and dance sectors, as well as articles addressing the big issues facing the arts and entertainment industry. Additional interviews, reviews and opinion pieces are included in the Soundings and Coda sections. Plus, discover upcoming events across the country in On Stage, and schedule your at-home listening with On Air & Online, which includes ABC Classic, independent radio and online broadcast information.

Limelight

Contributors

On Stage

In the Limelight

2026: FOR REAL • As AI pervades our lives, the performing arts offer us something that can't be replaced – a live experience, happening in real time, that connects us person to person. Actors, dancers, musicians and singers not only entertain us, but touch us emotionally and help us decipher the world around us.

BEATS AND BITES • Musicians seem to adore Jaime Martín, as do audiences. Clive Paget talks to the irrepressible Chief Conductor of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra about his move to the podium, his insatiable curiosity for music, his passion for cooking and his decision to pick up the flute again as a soloist for MSO.

Choral Storytelling • As her monumental play Lacrima comes to Australia, writer/director Caroline Guiela Nguyen tells Steve Dow why she likes interweaving different narratives – in this case, as a way to reveal the human cost stitched into every seam at a Parisian fashion house.

CHILD'S PLAY • Children's music might be educational, but it can be so much more than that. Paul Ballam-Cross discusses the composers who wrote various imaginative works specifically for children to play, and the perennial favourites that families enjoy listening to.

Melting the Ice • Turandot was radically different to anything Puccini had written before. To mark its centenary, Opera Australia is staging a brand-new production. Alexandra Wilson talks to director Ann Yee and designers Elizabeth Gadsby and David Fleischer about how they plan to reappraise the contentious opera for audiences today.

INTERVIEW A Sense of Place • In February, the Australian Chamber Orchestra premieres a work by John Luther Adams, who lived in Alaska for nearly 40 years and has now moved to Australia. Vincent Plush discusses the American composer whom he has known for three decades.

What's new on disc • This month features a new deal for Vasily Petrenko, blockbusters from John Wilson and Fabio Luisi, Víkingur Ólafsson's latest piano odyssey and beguiling songs by Rebecca Clarke.

Standing Trial • Mel Cantwell, Co-Artistic Director of Perth's inventive Lost and Found Opera, tells Jo Litson about the company's relaunch at this year's Perth Festival.

Persuasion on the Pianoforte • Jeneba Kanneh-Mason chats with Clive Paget about her new album, Jane Austen's Piano.

Three Men and a Painting • Director Lee Lewis tells Jo Litson why she believes Yasmina Reza's play ART is “lightning in a bottle”, particularly for the men in the audience.

Entertaining Mr Coppin: An Antipodean Showman in Civil War America by Simon Plant • A theatrical life so rich you really couldn't make it up.

Nouvelle Vague • Richard Linklater's irresistibly immersive film follows the shooting of Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless.

On Air & Online

ABC Classic concert program – January 2026

Independent radio & streaming January-February 2026

GUY NOBLE'S SOAPBOX On the Spot • As a jazz-loving carpenter installs his new kitchen, Guy Noble wonders if classical musicians are too obsessed with the written note.

WORLD PREMIERE Harp...