Gang-gang. Owl powerfully beautified by autumnal Turner

There as we go to press the Powl - the famous Powerful Owl, already lovely in its own right - has just been photographed by John Bundock with its loveliness enhanced by the changing leaves of the pinoaks in which it has been roosting. Look how its eyes match the leaves!

Perhaps for some a little of the loveliness of this image is sapped by the way in which the giant owl has a mangled sugar glider in its talons. But that's Nature.

Bundock is sure that the Powl, in search of some anonymity, will soon forsake the increasingly bare pinoaks for shadowy nooks in the neighbourhood's evergreens.

Tearing ourselves away from owl-rich Turner, we tango to the Llewellyn Hall.

Stephen Mould, an unfamiliar maestro but conductor of the Canberra Symphony Orchestra for last week's two symphonic extravaganzas, turned out to bear an eerie resemblance (at least from our row L of the packed Llewellyn Hall) to Scott Morrison.

One goes to events like symphony concerts to forget the everyday uglinesses of life, of which the unpleasant Morrison, as our electioneering Treasurer and as a public Christian, is a supreme representative.

But all fears that this might actually be Scott Morrison were soon allayed when Stephen Mould set about his maestroing and proved to be very, very good at it. One doubts that Morrison knows enough about music to tell a harp (the instrument he confidently expects to play in Heaven) from a glockenspiel. No, this definitely wasn't him.

On to the concert in a moment, but first, to usher in today's column's striking black and white picture, the observation that Llewellyn Hall's lavatories (like almost all public lavatories and institutions' lavatories everywhere) are forgettably plain. But they don't have to be so nondescript, as designer Maximo Recio has just shown with his recent transformations of toilets and change rooms at a co-ed school in London's Notting Hill.

"Following an exhaustive upgrade of the facilities' architecture" he testifies at his website, "I used zesty colours and black and white tiles to design a cost-effective solution that creates a sense of identity and playfulness. The colour palette invigorates each room and highlights the water and electricity systems, while the tiles are used to create messages, drawings and patterns that encourage children to use the facilities responsibly and increase hygiene."

But however forgettable Llewellyn Hall's lavatories, last week's two unforgettable events there were big events in the life of our metropolis. The cavernous Llewellyn Hall (1335 seats) was filled twice and a flock of 165 Canberrans participated as the choir required for Beethoven's seldom-performed-in-Canberra (because it is a big, beautiful brute of a thing that requires big forces) Choral Symphony.

Llewellyn Hall CSO audiences are used to the maestro style of CSO chief conductor and artistic director Nicholas Milton. His conducting manner is a little frenzied and he occasionally becomes airborne. Mould by contrast shows lots of urgency in his conducting body language but he never once left the ground. And even when the music required him to be very animated with his hands and arms and torso (there is high drama in the Choral Symphony) he reminded one of a very accomplished Tai-Chi maestro doing a fiendishly difficult and sometimes hectic routine with elegance and grace.

The Choral Symphony, ending in the great jamboree of optimism for mankind, was thrillingly performed. Lovely moments included a passage in the choir's contribution when schoolgirls (of Canberra schools for the children of rich gentlefolk) were somehow enabled to trill girlishly above everyone else. Baritone Andrew Moran, interviewed here ahead of the events, was superb and operatic. If Beethoven was there, watching, in spirit (and we feel he was) we think he must have been very taken with Moran. The baritone sang joyfully about the joy all people (and all creatures too, especially earthworms, and owls) should allow themselves to be lit up by.

Filled with joy and (in my case a rather temporary) love for all mankind I couldn't quite bring myself to stare daggers at the woman whose mobile kept trilling her callers' muffled voices from the depths of her handbag. Others did stare daggers at her but she was so rapt in the music (and may have been a little hard of hearing) that she couldn't hear her phone and didn't feel the daggers.

Big audiences for fine music can a be a trial, containing as they must a percentage of "characters". They gibber to their neighbours, take out and rattle their false teeth and wait for the most quiet and atmospheric moments to unwrap their foil-wrapped cough lollies from their cacophonous, crackling foil. Why can't cough lolly makers create special "concert packs" of soft wrappings especially for concert goers? Meanwhile, venues like the Llewellyn Hall should require patrons to pass through airport-style metal detectors that catch (and shame with a loud buzzer) anyone carrying anything packaged in racket-making tinfoil.

One never goes to a well-attended fine music concert without being reminded of Sartre's spot-on observation that Hell (a place awful Scott Morrison mistakenly thinks he is too righteous to be in danger of being sent to, given what a nasty unChristian immigration minister he was) is other people.