They promised Wagner for everybody at the Southbank Centre, and so far they're delivering. Community events cluster around a livescreening of each Ring instalment in the Clore Ballroom. We privileged few in the Festival Hall wondered how newcomers might be reacting out there, but there was no interval in the two-and-three-quarter-hour Das Rheingold to go and test the waters.

“It doesn’t need me,” Sebastian Thomas writes in this season’s Longborough programme, “to labour the idea that the content of a theatrical or musical piece should find some relevance to our own lives.” No, indeed. Practically every director one could name labours it already, sometimes with very odd results.

All 23 of Massenet's mature operas boast memorably melodious quarters of an hour and fastidious orchestration, so why Werther’s special status as a repertoire staple? Three or four great arias may have been enough to clinch it. There’s also the fact that the source, Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther, confers a highbrow status the opera, a pale shadow of the original, doesn't really deserve. At any rate it came over last night as no more than an after-dinner mint to a dark day's dining on scorpions.

ENO's new artistic director Daniel Kramer must regret having gone on BBC Radio 4's Start the Week to talk about suspending Janáček "and other obscures" from the company's repertoire for several seasons to come. Good God, if Jenůfa, Janáček's first searing masterpiece, can't move an ENO novice to tears then something's wrong. I can only repeat what I wrote about the recent concert performance, that I'd always recommend it as the first port of call for anyone who loves theatre and is wary of opera.

Natural disaster, in the shape of a metaphorical sea-monster ravaging classical Crete, might make a director's imagination work overtime on Mozart's first, jagged masterpiece. Alas, only unnatural disasters have been inflicted upon us in productions at Glyndebourne, ENO and the Royal Opera, with singers going some way to make amends. Now, at last, the green and pleasant valley of the Wormsley Estate has given birth to a clear and sober staging by Tim Albery that gives both the human beauties and the inhuman surrounding phenomena of the score their due.

Mozart operas on period instruments – it’s hardly a new idea, but it’s still the exception rather than the rule. The 18th–century sound has a lot to offer in Don Giovanni, as Ian Page and his Classical Opera Company demonstrated this evening. Clear string tone and vibrant woodwind colours were the order of the day. There was plenty of drama too, with Page expertly pacing the narrative and drawing an impressive and often robust tone from his modest forces. He also assembled a fine cast, no superstars here but rather a well-balanced and well-integrated ensemble.

As the hand-held credits popped up on screen to pianist and musical director Manoj Kamps's superb quartet arrangement of Mozart's Magic Flute Overture, the European Union's Culture Programme logo brought a spontaneous burst of applause. Not the norm for Suffolk this week, I'm told, but this audience knew how international opera is, how we're all connected in Europe's musical world.

Memo to self: never read the director’s programme essay.

It just goes to demonstrate the breadth and ambition of the Hebrides Ensemble’s work. For its 25th anniversary, the Scottish new music group (although its output delves a bit further back in time than that description might suggest) had commissioned a brand new chamber opera from Inverness-born Alasdair Nicolson, unveiled at Glasgow’s Cottier Chamber Project festival, with subsequent performances at Edinburgh’s Traverse Theatre and Orkney’s St Magnus International Festival, where Nicolson is artistic director.

Is The Cunning Little Vixen a jolly children’s pantomime, or is it a searching study of issues of life and death, Man and Nature? The answer, naturally, is that it’s both. Children dress up as animals, and sing and prance about. But at the same time grown-ups (both animal and human) dream and fantasize, couple and procreate, hunt and kill. Remarkably, it’s a tragedy that leaves no bitter taste. The heroine dies, but Nature goes on. The hardest thing to understand about hunters is that they identify with and even love their prey.