“La bohème, Tosca, Butterfly: you just know where you are with them, don’t you?” If the bar-chat at the opening night of the Opera Holland Park 30th anniversary season was anything to go by then La fanciulla del West still has its work cut out to make it onto the podium of Puccini all-stars.

Bellini's most consistently inspired opera, director Orpha Phelan tells us, has been set on a pedestal. Well, a pedestal would have been good for the titular Druid high priestess to deliver her celebrated invocation, a moon, perhaps some trees for the sacred wood, a chorus standing still in a semicircle. Traditional? Yes, but so is the shallow window-dressing for a rather interesting love-triangle.

Literally the first masterpiece of the 20th century (premiered on 14 January 1900), Tosca has had to wait until the second quarter of the 21st to arrive on the Glyndebourne stage. That delay tells you much about Glyndebourne, and about the lingering odour of distaste and even revulsion that for a long time hung in polite operatic circles around Puccini’s “shabby little shocker”.

It began with a Gothic funeral procession. A drum beat ominously as a line of figures with shabby black suits, whitened faces, and jagged mascara around hollow staring eyes walked solemnly through the audience. We were sat in the dry dock of the Cutty Sark, dominated by the historic ship’s elegant copper-clad hull suspended three metres in the air, a permanent reminder that this would end with Aeneas’s departure across the sea.

Sometimes operas – even immensely powerful ones – simply don’t make complete sense, and we can see why Dr Johnson dismissed the form as an “exotic and irrational entertainment”. Then again, that sounds fun, and also a fair description of much of Saint-Saëns’s Biblical blockbuster Samson et Dalila. At Covent Garden, in this comeback for Richard Jones’s 2022 production (with Benjamin Davis as revival director), the exotic parts certainly shine.

There are three aspects of English National Opera’s most ambitious project to date in Manchester that demand attention.

“Charges that no court has made will be shouted at my head.” And so it proves. Benjamin Britten’s fisherman Peter Grimes is damned before a note is sung – condemned not by a judge, but by his own community. Deborah Warner’s brutal 2022 staging, now back at the Royal Opera for its first revival, never lets us forget this. We don’t even see a courtroom.

It all adds up to a cleverly interconnected triple bill and the perfect experience for five singers from the Royal Opera's Jette Parker Artists Programme. There are three losses, two of them deaths, only one mourned for, a baritone in all three operas and three other singers in two of them, plus dazzling, finely honed work from various small forces of the Britten Sinfonia under conductor Peggy Wu (also on the JPAP). 

Before last night's still-shocking saga of a downtrodden soul began, Southbank Artistic Director Mark Ball came on to tell us that while concerts were mere events, Multitudes, "our multi-arts festival powered by orchestral music", was offering experiences. Rachel Halliburton, who reviewed Bach's The Art of Fugue with acrobats, would agree; Bernard Hughes, though, found Messiaen's Turangalîla ruined by a "tiresome film".

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