Easter was almost on us when the suggestion came. There was talk of a new Narnia film underway and of Meryl Streep lending her vast vocal range and capacity to assume any accent to the voice of Aslan. A friend of mine, a distinguished novelist who grew up in Pakistan and now lives in St John’s Wood, London, was asked once whether all the Christian theology C.S. Lewis packs into The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and its fellows was too much for her. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Sometimes a lion is just a lion.’

Yes, but can He be a She? Anyone who had the experience of reading aloud C.S. Lewis’s mighty beast to some tot was likely to be told, ‘He’s like Jesus.’

There are spoken word versions – an abridged one from Caedmon with Ian Richardson and a complete one with Michael York and they each project their most majestic bass-baritones.

Did perceptions of all this change when the previous films had Liam Neeson as the god-like beast. That witty journalist Jonathan Green quipped, ‘Perhaps he’s a Catholic Lion.’ Well, yes, except for the fact that Liam Neeson, though Catholic-bred, is a Northern Irishman and therefore shares in transfigured form an accent with that very Protestant figure Ian Paisley.

Everyone finds themselves confounded by this. It’s true that in recent decades we have seen both Vanessa Redgrave, on stage, and Helen Mirren, on screen, play Prospero (Prospera in their characterisations) the god-like magus of Shakespeare’s last play The Tempest who says, ‘I have bedimmed / the noontide sun’ and ‘graves at my command / Have waked their sleepers, oped, and let ‘em forth / By my so potent art’.

So why not give the Lion some version of the voice of the virtuoso actress who can take on the voices of Lindy Chamberlain and Margaret Thatcher? Some of the most majestic figures in the whole of Christian iconography are of the woman honoured in the Church’s liturgy with the words, ‘Blessed be the great mother of God Mary most holy.’

Yes, but there’s something in the way the imagination works – which C.S. Lewis plays on mightily – that wants a lion as traditional as the MGM one at the start of one of their movies.

And C.S. Lewis would have said he was using hypothetical allegories not reconstructing Christian mysteries. None of which makes the problem any easier. Neither Tolkien nor C.S. Lewis could stand his fellow Inkling’s work despite the obvious affinity. And if Philip Pullman is the closest successor in times of literary quality and imaginative reach it’s at least interesting that the author of His Dark Materials made the Church the villains and thought the Narnia books were pure poison.

There is the 2007 film of the first part of Pullman’s epic The Golden Compass with Nicole Kidman as Mrs Coulter, Daniel Craig as Lord Asriel and the voice of Sir Ian McKellen as the great bear Iorek Byrnison. There’s also a very watchable version with Ruth Wilson as Marisa Coulter, James McAvoy as Lord Asriel and Lin-Manuel Miranda as the airman. Michael Sheen, the impersonator of Tony Blair and David Frost, does the audio versions of Pullman’s ongoing saga (such as The Book of Dust) with great dexterity and colour.

It was interesting to see with what political dexterity the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra the other week included some quantity of poems by indigenous artists in the first part of their Four Seasons concert. The Four Seasons is the most popular work in the classical repertoire and it commands a vast audience who would not normally go to a concert very often. The Canadian violinist James Ehnes played the great seasonal mood pieces with the greatest delicacy and dexterity.

Then a fortnight later in company with the MTO’s principal conductor and artistic director Jaime Martín, Ehnes did the Violin Concerto of Brahms and the massed orchestra and chorus did Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé in D Major. One of the striking things about the arts in this country is that music is something that cannot be faked and that it is performed at a consistently high standard so that the satisfaction it gives its audience tends to be higher and more intense.

This is, of course, compatible with all manner of theatricality and self-conscious performative elan on occasion. On Wednesday 25 June, Lang Lang, that pianist of consummate showmanship and greater artistry will be doing a solo recital of a selection of Chopin alongside Fauré’s Pavane and Schumann’s Kreislerianaat at Hamer Hall. And then a few days later on Saturday 28 June he will dazzle performing Ravel’s Alborada del gracioso, Saint-Saëns’s Piano Concerto No. 2 and Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition conducted by Jaime Martín. He is a great musical practitioner who is also an indomitable showman. The queue will stretch a long way with this one.

It’s heartening to see that Lyndon Terracini – the man who made Opera Australia look like a gold mine of style and pizzazz (and who was at the height of his powers with Handa Opera on the Harbour) – is now doing a mini-version of this in the bush, in the town of Millthorpe to be precise. His wife, Noëmi Nadelmann, the Swiss soprano, will be doing a range of George Gershwin and Cole Porter songs. This sort of repertoire – the high and mighty Broadway staple – is so much part of the air we breathe that we forget how much the Germans, for instance, with their sense of opera as the dynamic art of musical drama rate them.

There’s a difference between Janis Joplin’s breathtaking version of Gershwin’s ‘Summertime’ and that of the great African-American soprano Leontyne Price but didn’t Pryce herself sing, ‘Anything you can do I can do better’ in one of the ‘guest’ spots in Karajan’s version of Die Fledermaus? And when Thomas Hampson did Annie Get Your Gun with Kim Criswell and Kiss Me, Kate with Josephine Barstow he was following in the tradition of Alfred Drake the singer actor who created the roles of Curly in Oklahoma!, Fred Graham in Kiss Me, Kate and Hajj in Kismet and who could also do a spoken word version of Omar Khayyam’s The Rubaiyat, Matthew Arnold’s Sohrab and Rustum and Shakespeare on Broadway. When Kiri Te Kanawa recorded South Pacific with José Carreras or West Side Story with Carreras conducted by Leonard Bernstein she was tracing the backward path of her own musical heritage.

And what a goddess-like voice she could roar with.