Arts editor HELEN MUSA scans the local arts scene for the latest news and it’s here in her latest Arts in the City column.

Emmy Award winning singer-songwriter Toni Childs, now an Australian, will be in town for a two-hour performance that celebrates her life’s musical works through fan favourites and an introduction to her new music. Childs, unafraid to go to the dark side in her songs, has over the years opened for Bob Dylan, performed duets with Al Green and Peter Gabriel and seen her music on film soundtracks, including Thelma and Louise. At The Playhouse, July 5.

Rising Polish piano star,  Lucas Krupinski, will be back in Canberra to perform masterpieces by Chopin, Scriabin and Brahms. Wesley Music Centre, June 29.

Canberra glass artist and writer Jennifer Kemarre Martiniello has been shortlisted for the $15,000 Wandjuk Marika Memorial 3D Award at the 2025 Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards, now in their 42nd year. In 2013 Martiniello won the overall prize in the awards. This time, her hot-blown glass eggs, Painted Desert Continuous Creation Story, aim to evoke the evolution of the landscape more than 80 million years ago. Winners will be announced in Darwin on August 8.

NLA Publishing is releasing Peculiar Parents, a book by Stephanie Owen Reeder and Ingrid Bartkowiak that explores 60 Australian native animals, focusing on all things family, including their courting practices, gestation periods, births and the raising of their young. Targeted readers aged 6-12 can expect all creatures cute, cuddly, slimy and ugly. 

Canberra Choral Society and National Capital Orchestra join to perform The Armed Man: A Mass for Peace by British composer Karl Jenkins, and Human Waves by Australian composer Elena Kats-Chernin. Conducted by the NCO’s music director Louis Sharpe, it features soprano Jillian Halleron and Liam Meany on cello. Llewellyn Hall, July 5.

Pianist Rio Xiang and violinist Cedar Newman will play Beethoven’s Sonata for Violin and Piano, Op. 12, No. 1; Franck’s Sonata in A Major for Violin and Piano and other repertoire at Greenaway Studio in Chapman on June 29. Newman is already familiar to ACT audiences, but this is the duo’s Canberra debut before they head for the Australian Festival of Chamber Music in Townsville.

Canberra Men’s Choir welcomes all men to its open night at The Harmonie German Club’s Zeppelin Room on June 30. Choir president Peter Fyfe says: “We’re a group of men who meet together to sing and have good times.”