That superb poet Peter Porter who was also in love with music used to say there was no denying the supremacy of Bach and Beethoven and Mozart but for sheer range who could beat Schubert. The lieder, every note of which was recorded by Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau with a meticulous care for the power of the words which the composer was animating, can summon up vast panoramas of experience that might sustain a great opera. And the majesty and variegation of the symphonies aside there is the piano music which allows a virtuoso pianist to shine and shine as he summons up worlds. Well, Melbourne’s Recital Centre promises just that with the eminent English pianist Paul Lewis performing the last three of Schubert’s sonatas on 5 February in the Elisabeth Murdoch Hall. It’s weird to think how long a time it took for people to realise what towering compositions these piano sonatas are but it’s a strange fact about the history of music (and indeed every art form) that some of the very greatest art can lie dormant until that moment when the taste of a later age happens to click with the artistic truth, the manifest apprehension of a great masterpiece. It happened with Bach, in literature it happened with Moby Dick of all things. But it’s hard not to think lovers of music will be there en masse to hear Paul Lewis, arguably the greatest interpreter alive of these Schubert sonatas, demonstrating the magic and the mystery of his art in empathic homage to Schubert’s.

Then on Friday 22 March the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra kicks off its mornings programme with a performance of Elgar’s Cello Concerto. Jaime Martín with his famed extroverted passion for music will be conducting and the cellist is the very highly regarded Alban Gerhardt. And isn’t there something bracing about the idea of listening to a great and deservedly popular piece of music like this at 11 in the morning when anyone lucky enough to be giving themselves an aesthetic long weekend will be alert and primed for the experience? Elgar is always thought of as a composer who could give his spirituality, his Catholic faith but also the buoyancy of his love of country, a popular expression which was never vulgar, never mind the hope and glory.

He was influenced by everything including Wagner’s chromaticism but in the Cello Concerto this celebrated and deeply English composer seems to look back on the world of something like optimism, a faith in the sense of happy expectation that was shattered by the first world war. There is a depth of melancholy that many people would tell you reaches its supreme expression in the great Jacqueline du Pré recording with Sir John Barbirolli but the modulation of this supremely moody piece of music, the grandeur of the way in which different emotions are dramatised and clarified, are great in any upper-level performance and Jaime Martín and Alban Gerhardt will surely do justice to the variegated complexity of this deeply elegiac work.

It’s interesting to see that Opera Australia are premiering a new production of Mozart’s The Magic Flute at the Opera House on 1 February. It has Stacey Alleaume as Pamina and that music theatre mainstay Ben Mingay as Papageno – a role Anthony Warlow used to take many years ago in his opera days. And coming back to Australia after a very successful run abroad there’s Michael Smallwood who will be taking the great tenor role of Tamino.

One of the extraordinary things about The Magic Flute – Die Zauberflöte as the German has it – is that it was conceived of as a Singspiel offering, very much a musical comedy. It was, if you like, the Grease of its day and it’s interesting that the new revival of Grease remains viable in the absence of John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John even if they provide persistent memory. Joseph Spanti and Annelise Hall take their roles in the current revival at Melbourne’s Her Majesty’s Theatre.

But The Magic Flute is one of those extraordinary transfigurations of its own elements which turns its material, its fairytale aspects into something directly comparable to Shakespeare’s last plays with utterly unpredictable and wild aspects of the plot turned into revelations of wisdom and truth. Klemperer made The Magic Flute into a monumental thing, almost Beethoven-like – without losing the enchantment though Böhm’s 1960s recording with Fischer-Dieskau as Papageno and the soaring pure tenor of Fritz Wunderlich is hard to beat.

Ingmar Bergman filmed The Magic Flute with great cunning and tact as if he were capturing a live performance where he was actually creating the illusion of one. There was also in more chocolate-box style a pretty viable production by Julie Taymor which was been seen here ‘live’ and also as a Met Live recording.

It’s inventive of Sharmill to present the National Theatre Live at the playhouse of the Opera House on 21 February at 1:30pm and 7pm of Vanya, a version of one of Chekhov’s four great plays in an adaptation by Simon Stephens (he also adapted for the stage The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon). This is apparently a weird rejigging of the play so that it becomes a one-man show with Andrew Scott doing all the voices and playing all the roles.

There is no reason in theory why this could not work. It is, after all, simply a stage version of what we are used to all the time with Audible books – Miriam Margolyes as Fagin, Miriam Margolyes equally adept as Oliver, the work through one voice turning into many. The English actor Stephen Dillane did Macbeth at the Adelaide Festival in 2006 like this strikingly and with some success.

Chekhov would present a particular challenge because his characters tend to talk in soliloquy when they are apparently talking to other people. This makes it sound as if the single actor on stage might triumph though you wonder if the talking to themselves aspect of Chekhov’s characters doesn’t necessitate the ungainsayable actuality of the different characters on the stage. If you want something to compare Andrew Scott to get hold of the Chichester production with Laurence Olivier as Astrov and Michael Redgrave as Vanya.