William Christie, Harry Christophers, Mark Morris, Sinead O’Connor, Rufus Wainwright – it’s a reamarkable list of the great and the good of classical and contemporary music, theatre, and dance. As we sit in a café in Darlinghurst to chew over the 2015 Perth Festival program, Jonathan Holloway has every reason to feel pleased. It’s not just Bill Grainger’s muesli that’s classy, for his Fourth and final line-up the savvy festival director has collected possibly his most impressive array of artists to date.

“I’m calling it the dream finale,” he tells me. “I started trying to get some of these people when I started out four years ago. It’s the culmination really of everything we’ve been trying to achieve.” I have the draft program in front of me and I have to admit it’s a page-turner – one of those reveals that a good showman such as Holloway can make a great deal out of. As I ‘ooh’ and ‘ah’ he talks about his considerable ambitions for his artistic denouement. “It’s about the epic and the intimate,” he says. “It’s about the classical and the digital – and the best of international and...