The other week this column blithely announced that the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra would be performing live that mighty and mightily iconoclastic work Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring in the near future. In fact they will be streaming last year’s production on their MSO.LIVE platform this Feburary which will be terrific for those of us who missed it. Music is one of those staples of life and it’s fascinating that in the next stretch we’re going to get two separate stabs at that cherished favourite Vivaldi’s Four Seasons: the first from the Chamber Philharmonia Cologne at Scots’ Church in Melbourne and the second from Richard Tognetti’s Australian Chamber Orchestra. Serious music – classical musical – is always a huge lift if you can come at it at all. Many people will be heading out from Melbourne to the proud gold rush city Bendigo to see Melbourne Opera stage that tumultuous epic of stolen treasure and the lust for power which is arguably the greatest dramatic work in the 19th century – at least pre-Ibsen – Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelungs. That fifteen-hour or more musical masterwork will have Warwick Fyfe again as Wotan and will be conducted by Anthony Negus and if it has any resemblance to the works in progress Suzanne Chaundy’s production should be a winnner.

There’s something deeply satisfying about the prospect of being tucked away in the jewel-box of a provincial city to drink deep of that curse of those Rhinemaidens – or rather, their gift: it’s the spurned Nibelung Alberich, that Hitler before the letter, who pronounces his curse on love.

It’s interesting that Shaw – one of the greater English language dramatists of the later 19th century (and 20th) and of course an Irishman – adored Wagner just as he was to be influenced by the the great Norwegian Ibsen who begins in poetic drama and comes in his late and some of his greatest work like When We Dead Awaken to give what looks like naturalism the equivalent of a musical notation.

It’s music – opera in particular – that creates the greatest drama of the Victorian period. It was Verdi who, according to Shaw, in every note of his music furthers the drama. Among dramatists of the very first rank there’s a gap between, say, Schiller and the earlier work of Ibsen, which includes extraordinary masterpieces such as Brand and Peer Gynt. It’s interesting too that in one of his darkest and most sepulchral scores full of the depths and heroics of so many male voices the Verdi of Don Carlos should take his bearings from Schiller. Just as he tackles Shakespeare in the case of Falstaff – which the great Bryn Terfel did in Sydney thirty years ago and succeeds in transfiguring the orginal, the Bard’s Merry Wives of Windsor.

It’s also fascinating in terms of the country town takeover by Melbourne Opera that Bendigo gets a good literary press. Les Murray, our most renowned poet, used to say, ‘He’s there’ – meaning God – ‘in that weatherboard church in Bendigo.’ Les found the spirit there as he did in the Hagia Sophia though he thought the Most High was harder to track down in St Peter’s Rome. I recall too a Gerald Murnane story which begins with a housekeeper perhaps complaining of the hot north wind and the priest for whom she works saying, ‘Do not speak ill of that wind. That wind comes from Bendigo.’

If your musical tastes don’t run to Rhinemaidens or twilights of the gods you might care to take a look at the production of Mary Poppins that’s being revived at Melbourne’s Her Majesty’s. It was first glimpsed in London the better part of twenty years ago in this Richard Eyre production from a Julian Fellowes revamp of the storyline and it certainly had a deep enchantment that was a shade or two darker than the original film with Julie Andrews as the governess with the cut-glass voice who has the kids frollicking to the tune of spoonsfuls of sugar. The orginal Eyre/Fellowes Mary Poppins was Laura Michelle Kelly who could sing a bit like Julie Andrews but was sterner and more severe and not just a sweetheart. Julian Fellowes’ masterpiece is in fact the script of Gosford Park which he worked on with Robert Altman rather than Downton Abbey or Mary Poppins but it’s certainly true that the fresh coat of darker paint he gave to this show gave its own excitements though the movie orginal will still hold up despite the Cockney accent – never heard on land or sea – of Dick Van Dyke. It does have that lovely actress Glynis Johns – the orginal Desiree in Sondheim’s A Little Night Music and a veteran of Disney’s British costume dramas in the 1950’s – as the suffragette mother and no one on earth could make English vowels sound as silvery and warm at the same time as Julie Andrews.

It’s good to hear that our own Brendan Cowell whose vowels have an Antipodean twang they could recognise in Bendigo has been playing John Proctor in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible (coming soon from NT Live) in London with Erin Doherty. Brendan Cowell wrote a masterpiece some years ago in The Sublime and he’s one of those Australian actors who just situates a role within the parameters of his own resources with absolute confidence. That’s always seemed to be the case with Nikki Shiels who’s playing Sunday Reed, that crucial figure in the history of Australian art, in Sunday and her partner Josh McConville – who acted like a god in The Sublime ten of so years ago –is playing Sidney Nolan. It’s an enterprising thing to take on a such a momentous piece of our artistic history, so electrically charged and so full of the tears in things.

The history of art is its own kind of drama and at the V&A in London they’re presenting a show of Donatello’s scultpure. Has there ever been a more languorous and erotically charged David than that be-sandled but otherwise naked figure he summoned up out of some swooming Florentine dream of what a warrior might look like at play. He is one of the supreme figures in the history of Western art with a sort of soaring quality that is not separate from his quality of relaxation. Would that the show was coming here.