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In Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (2011), the great detective goes to the opera. Don Giovanni is playing -but not as we know it. Moriarty has deceived Holmes into deducing that his nemesis has placed a bomb inside the base of the Commendatore's statue. When Holmes breaks into the prop from beneath the stage, he discovers that he has been misdirected: the explosion will happen elsewhere. To suggest that the scene lacks detonations, however, would be to ignore Hans Zimmer's contribution, composed in collaboration with his Remote Control colleagues Lorne Balfe, Matthew Margeson and Dominic Lewis. As Holmes experiences his moment of recognition, Mozart is exploding all around him.To say 'explodes' in this context might suggest a terrorist act, or a musical murder, and lead one into a recitation of tired tropes concerning the co-option of high art by mass culture. Of greater interest in the context of the present essay are the affective intensities generated by this sequence. The Commendatore scene in Don Giovanni already delivers one of the more sublime shocks in opera, but to compete with the battery of audio-visual effects and punch its weight in the context of the hyperbolic Holmes universe created by director Guy Ritchie and co-workers for this Warner Brothers franchise, merely dropping Mozart into the mix would have led to a problematic dip in intensity. Mozart, as such, needs to gain some extra musical muscle.As Holmes, Watson and Sim race to the opera, a portentous minor mode horn call, scored low for heavy brass, sounds against a string and drum ostinato. Briefly -giddily, delightfully -the key shifts down a major third and into a passage from Mozart's scoring of the build-up to the Commendatore's manifestation, replete with shots from within the opera house of the onstage action, before cutting back behind the scenes and to Remote Control's cue. This switchback is not the only way in which the fabric of the narrative discourse intensifies or warps. Meta-diegetic imagery interrupts the action, evoking Holmes's problem-solving genius, with the cuts into and out of these 'visions' marked by non-diegetic accentuations from the sound designer. Temporality becomes even more fluid when a sinister smoking characterone of Moriarty's gang -observes Holmes and team heading backstage. The villain's drag on his cigarette is sonically sweetened by a sizzling effect and underscored with a dissonant cluster and glissando; the glissando's stretching of pitch exaggerates the impression of time drifting, while cueing unease. When Holmes realizes that he has been deceived, the shot of his face (glimpsed through the 'O' of 'Imperatore' on the statue base) actually flexes, as if filmic representation itself is buckling in response to Moriarty's manipulations.

Picking the chocolate-coated plums – a traditional Polish treat – from the abundance of riches on offer at the 45th annual Warsaw Autumn Festival (20–28 September 2002) sets a delectable challenge. Most of the concerts were packed, and predominantly with young people; its events were held in venues ranging from the elegant National Philharmonic to the sleek Warsaw Stock Exchange; and a typically diverse range of contemporary music, programmed with insight and performed with great commitment, drew enthusiastic – and occasionally enthusiastically critical – responses from the audiences. Indeed, while the plentiful supply of complimentary chocolate bars from sponsors E. Wedel certainly helped sustain energy levels during the nine hectic days of events, the reflexive stylistic juxtapositions created this Autumn's true momentum.

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