But to stage the entire Ring is a very different proposition. Conducted by Philippe Auguin and based on a production by the English director Stephen Lawless, it is being mounted at the Poly Theatre in central Beijing — a vast hotel, conference centre and entertainment complex built two years ago by China’s largest armaments corporation, whose bosses (in common with everyone else in rampantly entrepreneurial “new” Beijing) see dollars all the way to the 2008 Olympics. When the London Symphony Orchestra played there last year, with tickets priced up to 2,800 yuan (£250), the 1,200-seat venue was packed. And not with tourists, but with Beijing’s young, intellectually curious and increasingly prosperous middle classes.

It will be full next week, too. The astonishing fact is that the country where Western classical music was banned only 30 years ago now can’t get enough of it. And The Ring is just one event in this autumn’s Beijing Music Festival, which also includes Sir Simon Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic and the violinists Sarah Chang and Joshua Bell. Clearly China’s tidal wave of modernisation has swept away the anti-Western artistic repression of the Cultural Revolution just as comprehensively as it has demolished the hutongs of corrugated shacks that once encircled the Forbidden City. It’s not so much that China has turned its back on its own culture. Rather, its authorities have realised that, with a population of 1.3 billion, they can easily nurture all sorts of music-making without compromising China’s core heritage.

And the response of Western orchestras? Should they be ecstatic about the huge marketplace that this opens up at a time when their home audiences are dwindling? Or terrified by the thought of what happens in 20 years, when China has trained enough brilliant Western-style musicians to dominate the world?

A bit of both, perhaps. There are plenty of reasons for joy. In dozens of cities across China, spanking new halls and theatres are going up — the result of the Chinese Government’s decision to increase its annual recreational spending to an eye-popping £4 billion in the run-up to the Olympics. The most spectacular is the nearly complete National Grand Theatre in Beijing — a 6,000-seat, egg-shaped, glass-and-titanium creation by the French architect Paul Andreu that looks like nothing else in China. Clearly this controversial new edifice will be a showcase predominantly for Chinese performers. But the other new venues offer apparently unlimited touring possibilities for American and European ensembles, especially if they can rustle up sponsorship from a Western corporation eager to get a toehold in China. The LSO’s tour last year, for instance, was heavily underwritten by Rolls-Royce.

Eminent Western musicians are also in demand to teach at China’s growing number of conservatoires. And soon China could be the world’s biggest market for classical CDs and published music. That makes the beleaguered managers of music organisations in Europe and America very excited indeed.

The worrying thing, from their point of view, is that if China’s own pool of skilled Western-style musicians continues to expand at its present exponential rate, the country will soon be exporting first-rate singers and instrumentalists to us, not the other way round. That is starting to happen. The pianist Lang Lang, cellist Jian Wang and soprano Li Ping Zhang are already big names in the West. Even more significant is the remarkable statistic that 38 million children are learning the piano in China. Little wonder, with a talent base like that from which to cherry-pick, that the country is now producing dozens of virtuoso teenage pianists every year — all of them displaying techniques that make most British or American conservatoire students sound like dilettantes.

Some Western critics maintain that this astonishing new crop of instrumentalists does not have the broader cultural understanding to play Western classics with anything other than mere technical finesse. What, these critics ask, do Chinese teenagers know of Mozart’s Vienna or Ravel’s Paris? But even if that charge is justified now (and I think it is 99 per cent racism), it surely won’t be true in ten years. China is now cannily dispatching many of its top students to finish their studies in the conservatoires of New York, London, Rome and Berlin, where they can imbibe as much Western culture as any native.

What I personally find most exciting about the country’s present love affair with Western music, however, is not the boom in performers but the quality of the composers that China is now producing, and in particular the fresh, open-minded way in which they draw freely on many different Western and Eastern traditions. Tan Dun is the best-known of them, not least for his Oscar-winning soundtrack to Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon.

But search out, if you can, the delightful music of Guo Wenjing and Ye Xiaogang. In Beijing next week Chinese listeners may well be awestruck by their first contact with the seminal musical masterpiece of 19th-century Europe. But I wouldn’t be surprised if it is a Chinese composer who pens the defining musical masterpiece of our 21st-century global village.

The top names to watch from China

Lang Lang

Back home in China the puppyish pianist has thousands of girls mobbing him at concerts, and he’s only 22.

Li Ping Zhang

The Chinese soprano has sung both Madam Butterfly and Lucia di Lammermoor at Covent Garden.

Long Yu

The artistic director of the China Philharmonic drew praise when he conducted the orchestra in London.

Guang Yang

Won the Cardiff Singer of the World competition in 1997, and sang Princess Eboli in WNO’s Don Carlos this year.