It’s funny to think that at the very moment when King Charles was going through his Coronation, pledging service and promising mercy in the midst of a tradition and a pageant older than the Norman Conquest, and with the constant susurration of a constitutional monarchy grounded in the vision of Christianity as the myth that underlay our democratic beliefs, Simon Rattle was performing Mahler’s Seventh, that most topsy-turvy and confusing of the great composer’s works, conducting the London Symphony Orchestra like the great master he is. There is always something uncanny in a culturally far-off country, about seeing a great conductor in command of his own orchestra and there was something breathtaking abut Rattle’s authority and dispatch, the effortlessness of his command and the concomitant delicacy. He only spoke after 80 minutes of the Mahler when he introduced the encores – Faure’s Pavane (‘to calm us down after the madness of Mahler’); a Stravinsky version of Happy Birthday for a young man turning 21; and one of Dvorak’s Slavonic Dances (‘because Dvorak makes everything better’) – but there was no doubting the magic behind the slight curly-white-haired figure.

It seems like yesterday though it must be more than thirty years ago, that the Penguin’s stereoguide started hailing the version of Mahler’s Second by a young guy who ran an orchestra in Birmingham as the equal of, if not the superior to, anything in the catalogue.

And Sir Simon has never looked back and was chief conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic from 2002 until 2018. He is an absolute Europhile, a hater of Brexit and all its works. It was funny to see the arrival of the recent British prime ministers – Boris Johnson among them – at the Westminster Abbey crowning, but Rattle believes in Europe über alles as so many cultivated Britons do. But it’s certainly true that in this country, when we see a conductor (or director or actor) of the very first rank it seems like a miracle. We see it through a lens of idealism. You might in far off days have got it when the legendary Peter Brook A Midsummer Night’s Dream toured here in the Seventies. I remember getting it as a child when John Gielgud did a one-man show and when Vanessa Redgrave – in the Eighties – brought the whole weight of Chekhov’s The Seagull to her recital of Nina’s speech (‘I’m a seagull. No, that’s not it’). And the effect was like a transfiguration. I remember it too with Jonas Kaufmann singing Lohengrin, whatever you made of the iconography of the production. And it was this sense of a pyrotechnical performative skill greater than you thought you had any right to expect which you get from Simon Rattle.

Some people will always see Mahler as a footnote to Wagner, and the Seventh as a residually incoherent one to boot, but this would hardly limit the ease and lucidity of Rattle’s conducting: and besides everyone who did not break with classical form and embrace the atonal, including Shostakovich, is a footnote to Wagner. That’s a reason why it’s appropriate that the most dazzling and iconoclastic of modern poems – ‘The Wasteland’ – should include that echo of the Rhinemaidens, as well as the snippet of The Flying Dutchman.

It’s been an extraordinary thing that Melbourne Opera has managed to mount entire Ring Cycles – with Suzanne Chaundy’s very traditional embodiment of the action (and Warwick Fyfe’s magnificent singing as Wotan) in that beautiful country city, Bendigo – a Valhalla of a retreat for those who could enjoy it, and it came with a seminar from the wonderfully named Siegfried Jerusalem who can be seen and heard in the Chéreau/Boulez production of the Ring Cycle, which the BBC serialised and the ABC ran on Sunday nights way back in the 1980s.

That was the production that not only had Gwyneth Jones as Brunhilde, but the great New Zealand bass Donald Macintyre as Wotan, the first Anglo-Saxon to sing the role at Bayreuth. He was later a great Hans Sachs for Opera Australia in The Master Singers, that most humane of Wagner’s works, as well as a great work about the nature of art.

It will also be fascinating to see Opera Australia’ s concert performance of Tannhäuser at Hamer Hall on either 17 May or 20 May, because sometimes the discarding of representationalism can actually highlight the drama because no time is wasted on that symbolic fiddling. The production has Stefan Vinke as Tannhäuser and Amber Wagner as Elisabeth.

Are there limits to how much we can see shows about shows? Perhaps not in a world that includes Fellini’s 8 ½. Sam Mendes, in any case – whom I saw allow Kevin Spacey to do a Richard III of unparalleled (and viscerally frightening) violence – is directing in London’s West End just at the moment, a play by Jack Thorne – J.K. Rowling’s brilliant and enhancing collaborator on Harry Potter and the Cursed Child – which is all about the production of Hamlet on Broadway in 1964 with Richard Burton as the Prince, which was directed by Sir John Gielgud who also projected the voice of the Ghost. The Motive and the Cue has Mark Gatiss, an odd choice looks-wise for Sir John, Tuppence Middleton as Elizabeth Taylor (to whom Burton was married at the time) and Johnny Flynn as the legendary Welsh actor. People who know their Shakespeare would have killed to see the original production, the recording of which was played on Australian commercial radio one long ago Saturday night in 1964.

Johnny Flynn was first seen here in Ed Hall’s all-male Shakespeare at the Perth Festival, and he played the younger Einstein in the TV biodrama where the mature magician of relativity was Geoffrey Rush.

It will be fascinating to see if Johnny Flynn can do the Burton voice which enthralled Winston Churchill so much that he asked that Burton be used for his speeches in the Sixties documentary which had music by Richard Rodgers, The Valiant Years.

If you want to see a dazzling, sexually ambivalent performance of Flynn’s, get hold of the NT Live broadcast of Hangmen, another of the masterpieces of Martin McDonagh, of The Banshees of Inisherin and In Bruges fame.