Over the last three years of the London Handel Festival, two experimental productions have proved to be highlights – not just of the festival itself – but of the musical year. In 2023, Adele Thomas’s In The Realms of Sorrow brought sweat, muscularity and subversion to four of Handel’s early cantatas with stunning effect.

Just now, the notion of a long-term project that concludes in 2041 sounds like an optimistic bet on the far future worthy of some 18th-century Enlightenment philosophe – Voltaire’s Dr Pangloss, maybe. The musicians of The Mozartists are clearly hoping for the best in the best of all possible worlds, as their MOZART250 programme ambitiously tracks, in annual increments, the music that Wolfgang Amadeus wrote exactly 250 years ago.

Imagine if Bach had set Cardinal Benedetto Pamphili’s allegory of Beauty breaking free from Pleasure with the guidance of Time and Enlightenment: he’d probably have hit the spiritual highs. The 21-year-old Handel, at least as this multifaceted performance so vigorously and poetically argued, plumps for hedonistic delights.

Drained as they are at present of crucial funds, WNO are managing to put on only two operas this spring, and spaced out to the point where it could hardly be called a season. For their new Peter Grimes we must wait till April. Meanwhile we can relish Tobias Richter’s sparkling nine-year-old Figaro, skilfully revived, with a few tweaks, by Max Hoehn.

Who’s in and who’s not – on the secret, the joke, the relationship, the family, the club? That’s the fulcrum of Joe Hill-Gibbins’ ingeniously simple Figaro for English National Opera. A white box and a row of doors supply the only set to speak of for a production less interested in the entrenched tensions of upstairs-downstairs than the shifting alliances and fragile coalitions of a household in flux.

Ten years ago, Ian Page launched his and the Mozartists’ (then Classical Opera’s) remarkable endeavour to play music by WA Mozart 250 years after it was written, starting with a programme of material from 1765 by eight-year-old Mozart, and his contemporaries.

Unlike the controversial Netflix show Baby Reindeer, which challenges many of the same attitudes towards sexual harassment, self-delusion, and stalking’s gender bias, Alice Lowe’s second feature as director, writer, and star does not bill itself as a true story.

Before Alice Lowe wrote her first short film scripts, she was, despite success in television and theater, “terrified” of making a full-length feature. “I thought it was some untouchable Holy Grail. That you have to be somehow inducted before you’re allowed to breathe the word ‘film'." She's not terrified these days. Timestalker, Lowe’s second feature as director, writer, and star, is a fully realised passion project in every sense.

Two splendid pieces of orchestral virtuosity began and finished the second Saturday concert by the BBC Philharmonic under John Storgårds at the Bridgewater Hall. It was given the title of “Mischief and Magic”, an apt summary.

For mischief we had Richard Strauss’s Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks, perhaps the most perfect of his orchestral tone poems in that it not only tells a story but is beautifully shaped and balanced as an extended classical rondo.

In an autumn season of three revivals, Opera North begin by inviting James Brining, artistic director of Leeds Playhouse, to oversee his own production from five years ago of Mozart and Emanual Schikaneder’s extraordinary musical play. It’s the mainstay of the season, returning in 2025 (with some cast changes) as well as dominating the next two months.

The fifth version of The Magic Flute I’ve seen from the company, and one of the best, it’s performed in English, with side-titles in use to ensure that no one misses the progress of the story.