The Australian National Academy of Music gala performance on Friday 21 March was dazzling with guest conductor Asher Fisch leading these young musicians through an impassioned and grand performance of one of the supreme works of Western music, Brahms’s Second Symphony. There is something intensely moving about watching these super-talented kids give a performance so absolutely assured.

Meanwhile, Vivaldi’s Four Seasons is at Melbourne’s Hamer Hall on Friday 28 March and Saturday 29. The notable Canadian violinist James Ehnes is directing as well as displaying his bravura talents to animate this supremely easeful composer who creates images that dramatise and compel visualisation. There’s also indigenous artwork put together by Aaron Wyatt with Leonard Weiss conducting.

Vivaldi is the immensely popular classical composer and the MSO under Jaime Martín is open to the pathway between the heights of music and the world everyone knows from movies. Hence the performance of John Williams’ score for Star Wars: The Force Awakens plus the movie in Concert on 22 to 24 May.

And now we’re getting more radio drama with Ryan Corr from Packed to the Rafters doing a full cast recording of The Winning Formula by Cara Veloce in a cast that includes Tai Hara from Home and Away and veterans like Vince Colosimo and Lucy Bell.

Marshall McLuhan, the Canadian media analyst, said that radio was a more intensely engaging medium than television. The spoken word tends to hook us in and keep us absorbed. That’s why we still listen to Pete ‘n Dud. Their TV show Not Only… But Also was great but their essential quality is there in the words. That’s also why the late great John Clarke used to say, ‘They seem to imagine television is a visual medium. It’s a visual medium among other things.’

And we forget what’s possible with radio. Did you know that when Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier visited Australia in 1948 they did a version of Gone with the Wind in which Larry payed Rhett Butler? And Richard Connolly, the one-time head of ABC drama and features, got the legendary Irish actress Siobhán McKenna to play Mrs Alving in Ibsen’s Ghosts for him. Peter Finch was an Australian radio star before his international career.

And there was the overlap with television. In the early-sixties that melancholy clown Tony Hancock could be listened to on Hancock’s Half Hour, not just watched. Think of The Goons and the extraordinary comic inventiveness that was made possible by the fact that we heard but couldn’t see them. That’s also true of Peter Sellers’ satirical portraits – his Sir Eric Goodness miming Sir Alec’s saintly manner.

Acting lost something when it lost its acute awareness of sound. Some of the very greatest spoken word recordings – James Mason, say, reading The Book of Ecclesiastes (‘Vanity of vanities… A time to love, a time to hate’) were done in the golden age of radio. So was Under Milk Wood.

Some actors’ careers are inseparable from their radio beginnings. Leonard Teale was famous for doing Homicide as a tough cop in a hat and was later the stern father in Seven Little Australians but he began in the heyday of radio as Superman.

No one ever recorded the traditional Australian ballads of Banjo Paterson and Henry Lawson with greater nationalistic élan but Leonard Teale could also do Douglas Stewart’s ‘The Bishop’ (‘Robed and mitred the bishop stands and hard by his ear a pigeon sits in the sun on top of his head and tells him about religion’) and John Thompson’s ‘You can’t argue with a dead man.’ It wasn’t all the love of a sunburnt country, though no one – including Jack Thompson – could equal him in this arena. There were also people who could testify to the quality of his stage work back in the Old Tote days before it became the Sydney Theatre Company.

The Spotify and Apple apps can provide some taste of what’s available in the spoken word area though these full cast original dramas will require an Audible subscription.

It’s impressive however that they are giving away recordings of literary classics free of charge. This can be marvellous with Dickens so that it becomes a thing of wonder in the recordings of his novels because he famously ‘does the police in different voices’.

Dickens, according to the critic Edmund Wilson, belongs to the tiny handful of the greatest masters of dialogue who ever lived – Tolstoy and Proust were the other two. So when Miriam Margolyes does Oliver Twist or Martin Jarvis does David Copperfield and Great Expectations and Sean Barrett does Bleak House and Barnaby Rudge you have an extraordinary theatre of voices coming at you. The paradox too is that Dickens is easier to listen to than he is to read with your eyes and that is also true of literature in general. It’s not hard to get through Neville Jason’s complete recording of War and Peace even though he doesn’t characterise the voices. His Charlus in Proust is too camp but what an achievement to get every jot and tittle of that masterpiece recorded. Or the different, very elegant recordings of Joyce’s Ulysses though nothing can equal the 30 minutes or so of Siobhán McKenna doing Molly Bloom or the genius of Cyril Cusack doing the Christmas scene from Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

Then there are the spoken worders that shine against every comer. The BBC radio version of The Lord of the Rings from the 1980s with Sir Michael Hordern as Gandalf and Robert Stephens as Aragon is not only better than Peter Jackson’s films, it’s better than the book.

Of course, there are plenty of places (including YouTube) to find recordings of great drama. Recently we’ve been listening to versions of one of the greatest playwrights who ever lived, Molière. A few decades ago Jean-Pierre Mignon of Anthill captivated Melbourne audiences with Molière. There are a couple of recordings which enthral the listener and make you realise how this dazzling comedian was something more. The 1983 Tartuffe with Antony Sher as the religious scoundrel and Nigel Hawthrone as Orgon who believes in him has a translation by Christopher Hampton in blank voice which flawlessly mimes the creepiness of the imposter. On the other hand Tony Harrison’s version of The Misanthrope from 1973 with Alec McCowen as Alceste and Diana Rigg as Célimène is performed in rhyming verse with a musical brilliance which brings out the artistry but never dissipates the realism.