It will be fascinating to see what Jamie Martín, the head of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, makes of Mahler’s Second Symphony, the Resurrection Symphony, when it is performed with the requisite massed chorus of the MSO as well as the maximal possible orchestra for this ‘huge’ symphony which represents this great composer at his most grand. It is being backed by Ryman Healthcare and performances are at 7:30 p.m. on Thursday 27 February and again on Saturday 1 March  both at Hamer Hall. It features the soprano Eleanor Lyons and the mezzo Catriona Morison.

This work is Mahler at his most spectacular and the Resurrection is full of religious feeling as the composer contemplates his own extinction in sections which juxtapose a Trauermarsch of great poignancy with what turns into a recollective rehearsal of former happy days only to issue into the call from on high which is a transfiguration of human striving and sorrow. This is Mahler at his most ambitious giving voice to the edict of the creative spirit with the massed orchestra insinuating its identity with the face of the Most High.

It will be interesting to see if Jaime Martín’s natural extroversion predominates or whether he achieves the intensity of the religious exaltation.

It’s fascinating to think how long it took for Mahler – instantly recognised as a great conductor – to be acknowledged as a great composer as well.

It’s hard to know what tradition to put Playing Nice in. It screens on SBS and has James Norton who was an utterly charismatic psychopath in Happy Valley with Sarah Lancashire.

For most of its length, Playing Nice is an utterly compelling streamer which is all about two couples who turn out to have had their toddler boys exchanged at birth. The less you know about the development of the plot the better but it is an wholly unpredictable saga.

James McArdle is staggering as James Norton’s opposite number and his wife Jessica Brown Findlay seems a beautifully attractive figure. Norton is married to Niamh Algar who is absolutely sympathetic for all her frailties and whose Irishness is perceptible only because of the purity of her vowels.

The ending disappoints a bit but perhaps not surprisingly given the horrors this streamer sets in play.

There was something a bit amazing about the death of Marianne Faithfull the other day. She had survived so much that you felt she might go on forever. She will always be associated with the Rolling Stones because she knew all of them in every sense, including the biblical one. But this convent-educated girl with the dulcet voice survived terrible overdoses – 150 barbiturates here in Australia after she looked in the mirror and saw Brian Jones’ face, the dead member of the Stones.

That was the end of her four-year relationship with Mick Jagger which will live forever in legend. She apparently inspired ‘Let’s Spend the Night Together’ with its raunchy directness, ‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want’ with its wistful longing and the very beautiful ‘Wild Horses’. It’s worth remembering that, as with Dylan, the great Stones songs were written a long time ago.

When she first appeared Andrew Oldham, the Rolling Stones manager, described her as an angel with big breasts and she went on to record the Jagger-Richard’s ‘As Tears Go By’, a plaintive and poignant ballad which she sang beautifully while also looking like the most exquisite creature. It got to number seven on the charts but Marianne Faithfull was already famous.

Later, more darkly, she co-wrote ‘Sister Morphine’ which features on the Stones 1971 album Sticky Fingers and it took the longest time for her to get royalties for it.

In any case, Marianne Faithfull was there when the police raided Keith Richards’ country house in Sussex. Marianne Faithfull emerged from a bath in nothing but a fur and there was scurrilous talk from the coppers about some feat she was going to perform with a Mars bar. This sounds highly improbable given that despite how frank she was she denied it.

But most things that could go wrong did go wrong for Marianne Faithful. She lost custody of her child because of her heroin addiction. She lived in squats, she lived on the streets.

The finest of her albums Twentieth Century Blues: An Evening in the Weimar Republic and Broken English are very fine indeed. She played the devil in The Black Rider – inspired by William Burroughs – with the lord of experimentalism Robert Wilson and did The Threepenny Opera at the Dublin Gate Theatre in 1991. All her Brecht/Weill work has great authority as if the spirit of Lotte Lenya and Dietrich was alive in her.

Years earlier she had looked like having an acting career. She played Ophelia in the production of Hamlet directed by Tony Richardson with Nicol Williams in the title role and Anthony Hopkins as the king. Looking at it again in the wake of her death, Marianne Faithfull’s performance has an intense erotic glow, full of sexual expectation and confidence. Her Ophelia before the madness is utterly poised and purring and it is good to have a record of her in what is arguably the finest and certainly the most rapid Hamlet on screen. She also did Chekhov’s The Three Sisters at the Royal Court with Glenda Jackson.

But she was an extraordinary woman and you can see why later public figures – Courtney Love and Kate Moss among them – took her as a regal figure and a model of human endurance. It’s worth remembering that she played God on Absolutely Fabulous. But she was a huge talent and an extraordinarily vivid personality.

She did a Shakespeare Sonnets Show, highlighting the Dark Lady. She recorded the Romantic poets on She Walks in Beauty with sound accompaniment from Brian Eno and Nick Cave.

She cherished the kindness of those who looked after her when she was down and out. You wonder about an age that could take her so much for granted. She modified the slogan about the Sixties. ‘If I wasn’t there,’ she said, ‘it didn’t happen.’ With the passage of time the beautiful young thing’s voice was a ruined croak but Marianne Faithfull was a woman of grandeur who outstared the extremities of experience she fell into or had thrown at her. With all its blackness her legend will last forever.