Will Mcnicol

The last days of the American icon Walt Disney form a powerful and poignant subject for Philip Glass's latest opera, which was filmed at its first performances in Madrid in January 2013. Phelim McDermott's spectacular production is worthy of Disney's own visual imagination and its definitive influence on American culture, while in the pit is the conductor Dennis Russell Davies, an experienced and authoritative champion of the composer's hypnotically beautiful music, which gives wings to Rudy Wurlitzer's operatic transformation of Peter Stephan Jungk's novel, using both fact and fiction to peer into Disney's troubled psyche as illness forces him to confront his mortality.

Steve Johnson - or Stevie J, as he's known to the many who who love him - is the mercurial genius who was at the heart of three Geelong premierships. His 2007 season in particular is one of the great football stories and one that will be long remembered - he went from being arrested for drunk and disorderly conduct at the start of the year to Norm Smith medallist at the end.