Here’s arts editor HELEN MUSA’s latest “Arts in the City” column.

VIOLINIST Noa Wildschut and pianist Elisabeth Brauss make one of the most exciting European musical partnerships heard in years, and Musica Viva will bring them to Llewellyn Hall on November 27.

LIZ Lea’s Stellar Company plans on finishing 2023 with a bang, aligning with International Day of People with Disability to present “A Stellar Lineup”, a team of Canberra’s community dance companies, at Canberra College Theatre, December 1-2. Performers include the Deaf Butterflies, Project Dust, Subsdance, ZEST, the 4 Me Dancers, GOLD and the Chamaeleon Collective, Canberra’s first inclusive dance company.

IT’S that time of the year and Oriana Chorale, directed by Dan Walker, will perform Poulenc’s set of Christmas motets, which famously opens with “O Magnum Mysterium”, along with Frank Martin’s “Mass for Double Choir” and works by Maddalena Casulana and Sydneysider Brooke Shelley. Wesley Uniting Church, Forrest, December 1.

ALSO, with the season in mind, the Canberra Men’s Choir will perform “Journey to Christmas” at St. John’s Church, Reid, December 2.

FOLLOWING our grumpy comment about Sydney’s Hayes Theatre’s failure to mention Canberra’s part in the success of Canberra’s Heart Strings Theatre Co’s “The Hello Girl”, we’re pleased to see that the company has now updated its PR. It now says that the show, which will run during January, was supported through Canberra Theatre Centre’s New Works and Sector Development Program “to elevate the work of ACT artists and producers” and that the production premiered at The Playhouse in September.

INSPIRED by Louise Bourgeois’ and Tracey Emin’s collaborative work “Do Not Abandon Me”, acquired by the National Gallery in 2020, a new survey exhibition called “Deep Inside My Heart” exploring the work of major female artists of the 20th and 21st centuries, will open at the gallery on November 25 and run until May 19. It includes Kiki Smith’s tapestry, “Sky, Earth and Underground”, and a group of early sculptures by the late Bronwyn Oliver.

CANBERRA International Music Festival’s commissioning circle, A Major Lift, has announced its chosen composers for the 2024 event – Holly Harrison, from Western Sydney, who will write for an all-women percussion trio and Nicole Smede, a participant in Ngarra-Burria First Peoples Composers program, who will write a song for Australian mezzo-soprano Lotte Betts-Dean.