It’s cheering to hear very promising reports of Barrie Kosky’s production of Siegfried at Covent Garden suggesting that the Melbourne-born director is better than anybody at capturing the gormless boy in the great sword maker.

It brought back memories of watching in the long-ago, early-1990s a production of Mozart’s Don Giovanni by Kosky which – even though it was a young student cast – was conceptually and dramatically superior to whatever I had just seen in London – was it by Jonathan Miller, certainly someone of that eminence.

Well, Kosky is, like him or loathe him, one of those directors who transfigures what he touches even if you’re left with a sort of spectral presence, a ghost of the former glory where you ask where have those Flying Dutchmen gone.

It’s striking that Melbourne Opera is doing a version of Don Giovanni directed by Suzanne Chaundy at the Athenaeum from 26 April to 3 May. She’s a one-time associate of that man of many stances Jean-Pierre Mignon, the man who brought Moliere to Melbourne, but she has shown in the last few years the appeal of traditional opera productions that demonstrate what the work can do rather than what can be done with the work.

This sounds like a production that is refusing to bow to the savage glamour of Don Giovanni. I remember the eminent American baritone Thomas Hampson – who was at the lighter end of the role vocally – saying that he had been influenced by Eberhard Wächter in the recording conducted by Giulini who had a bigger voice than Hampson but to whom the sneer and the scorn were fundamental. It’s significant that Hampson, renowned for his light touch in opera, could see the dramatic viability of this.

Is it true that Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau (that most vibrant and versatile of baritones) allows the beauty of his lieder technique to make the words glow like jewels of idealism and nobility in some of the great numbers – ‘Viva la libertà!’ and ‘Là ci darem la mano’ – simply because he had such dramatic power? On that Philharmonia recording we are also – with an unforgettable intensity – made aware of the violations that have been perpetrated against the women brought alive by the very grand voices of Elisabeth Schwarzkopf and Joan Sutherland.

In Chaundy’s production Lee Abrahmsen is Donna Anna who is not only abused but sees her father – who will return as the Stone Guest – cut down before her eyes. Eleanor Greenwood is that torn and complex figure Don Elvira and Zerlina – the peasant girl who becomes the object of the Don’s lust – is played by Rebecca Rashleigh.

Of course a lot of interest is going to be focussed on the baritone Christopher Tonkin who is to play the Don and will no doubt use the many-coloured cloak of his different characterisations in Britain and Australia to capture the man and the mythic charisma which the music partly encourages and partly stands apart from.

But Don Giovanni is funny. It’s fair enough to want to revive the substitute title, The Rake Punished, but the Don’s narcissism – the thing that makes a cancelling world shriek in horror – is complexly mediated by our composer who has pretty mighty claims to be the greatest master of musical high drama – and with it high comedy – who ever lived.

Think of Leporello, Don Giovanni’s servant, who is being sung by Henry Shaw who won the OperaChaser Critics emerging talent award. His list of the Don’s conquests is beautifully modulated. You can listen to the classic recordings to get a sense of both the priapic seducer – remember when men called women nymphomaniacs? – and womeone who gains an entry into a world where sex is a dream or a joke. Listen to the way Giuseppe Taddei does it for Giulini or José van Dam in the Joseph Losey film. But Don Giovanni contains contrasted worlds.

When Ken Russell directed the deep bass Ruggero Raimondi as the Don he wanted him to piss into a holy water fount but Raimondi refused. Perhaps this tallies with the Catholicism that keeps going in and out of focus in what many think is the greatest opera ever written. Eddie Muliaumaseali’i is the Stone Guest, the dead father who drags Don Giovanni down to hell.

Of course there’s another side of the opera. Something a bit more in the tradition of Talleyrand saying, ‘Those who have not lived under the Ancien Regime do not understand how sweet life can be.’

How much will the conductor Raymond Lawrence emphasise the sweetness in ‘Madamina, il catalogo è questo’ and how much moral reaction will the work call up in its storm and monumental majesty?

In the days when I collected sets of Don Giovanni I had one with Nicolai Ghiaurov conducted by Otto Klemperer (who was accused of making everyone sound like Beethoven). On the other hand Bruno Walter’s Don, Ezio Pinza – the first Emile de Becque in South Pacific – was thought by Lord Harewood to be the greatest Don Giovanni who ever lived.

It’s fascinating to see that Reg Livermore’s Ned Kelly: The Musical is to be performed by Victoria Opera on 24 and 25 July at Melbourne University’s Union Theatre. Anyone who saw Livermore at the height of his fame in the 1980s in one-man shows like Betty Blokk-Buster have the memory of exclaiming, ‘Now that’s how you sing a Billy Joel song!’

Then there was his stint as Max Bialystock in the musical version of The Producers which drew the admiration of Mel Brooks himself. It figures that Ned, who inspired everyone from Sidney Nolan to Peter Carey to Justin Kurzel, should be the source of a work by a giant of the Australian musical theatre.

The German Film Festival (8 to 27 May) looks arresting. It opens with the last film of Wolfgang Becker, Berlin Hero. This year’s centrepiece is Amrum from award-winning director Fatih Akin (Goodbye, Lenin) starring Diane Kruger. There is a retrospective of three of his other films plus a film of the mystery story I’m Not Stiller which is from Switzerland and based on the classic by Max Frisch.

On top of this there is the chance to see the director’s cut of Wolfgang Petersen’s Das Boot on the big screen.