There’s something slightly odd about listening to Bluebeard’s Castle, Bartók

You know to expect a crazy ride, especially when Gerald Barry, greatest living Wildean and wild one among composers, has flagged up his very unStraussian take on Salome with "I didn't want her to dance, so I thought...not "dance", but "type' "(there are three typewriters of varying ages at the front of the concert platform). Right at the start, with deliberately unwieldy unison galumphings, mostly strings and lower brass, you also know it's him by the style.

Just now, everything WNO does inevitably bears the mark of their Arts Council-imposed financial troubles, and this new Flying Dutchman directed by Jack Furness is no exception. It proceeds on a bare stage largely devoid even of props, the singers costumed in the most mundane modern street-wear, no sign of the sea or ships, nothing beyond a few mysterious period-clad Scandinavians far upstage and some neutral back projections on which the audience is invited - I suppose - to bring their imaginations to bear.

Good Friday and the days before it are times to contemplate Bach's great passions - the St Matthew was performed at the Baden-Baden Easter Festival before I arrived with Klaus Mäkelä conducting the Concertgebouw Orchestra - but not so much another powerful ritual. Britten's War Requiem seared the soul again this Good Friday with the profoundly impressive Joana Mallwitz conducting the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, and it seemed like a masterpiece equal to Bach's.

“Fear death by water,” says the fortune-teller in TS Eliot’s The Waste Land. There were a few moments in Natalie Abrahami’s new production of The Turn of the Screw when I worried that the fine musicianship and otherwise smart direction in evidence all around might founder irrevocably beneath the sodden weight of its core conceit. For long sections, especially in the second act, the singers stand or splash around a waterlogged stage. 

Tamerlano, tyrannical Emperor of the Tartars, is a burger-munching boor with a golf-habit, a bulbous belly and a crashing disdain for other people’s sensitivities. In Orpha Phelan’s dynamic, gleefully idiosyncratic production of Handel’s 1724 opera, Trump’s shadow looms large, as Tamerlano tries to force Bajazet, Emperor of the Turks, to haggle for his freedom by offering up his daughter, Asteria, for Tamerlano’s sexual delight.

Harry Fehr’s directorial take on The Cunning Little Vixen is a sound one: keep it simple.

In one of the loveliest operatic scores of all time, Dvořák makes cruel demands on his eponymous water nymph and the prince for whom she acquires a mortal soul, having them soar above the stave countless times in anguish or ecstasy. Irish soprano Jennifer Davis and American tenor Ryan Capozzo are both equal to the challenge. 

Have you ever witnessed both a Tristan and an Isolde physically plausible and vocally up to everything that Wagner throws at them, from violent cursing to heartbreaking tenderness? I hadn't until yesterday. At first it seemed as if Yuval Sharon's supposedly controversial production would smother Lise Davidsen's Isolde and Michael Spyres' Tristan in concepts and restrict them to a narrow curve set back from the front of the stage and hovering above it. 

When the joyful energy at the final curtain - love briefly triumphant in the power-dominated world of Wagner's Ring - is as insanely high as it was at the end of a dizzying first act, that killer of a forging scene, you know this is a winner.