Spirit of place first: Nevill Holt, which I was visiting for the first time, is a beauty. There's an Oxford college look about the facades, from 13th century to more recent additions, a lawn on the hill gives splendid views over the Welland Valley, while gardens and catering rival Glyndebourne and Garsington. 

If you find endless riches in Hugo von Hofmannsthal's words and Richard Strauss's score for their "Comedy for Music", as I do, you'll be very happy to catch Bruno Ravella's deliciously staged fantasy again. This was my third time. It had a difficult birth at Garsington during the Covid era - no touching for the 32-year-old Marschallin and her 17-year-old lover Octavian in the opening bedroom scene - then went to Dublin, where Irish National Opera had assembled a remarkable cast with three Irish leading ladies.

There’s only one thing harder than trying to get to Kings Place to see a semi-staged Dido and Aeneas on the day of Arsenal’s victory parade through north London, and that’s trying to get home again afterwards. It took me longer to get from the venue to sitting on a tube than it did for Dido to go from being a happy singleton to tragically dead. As I battled closed stations and a wall of red shirts and a ticking clock, I experienced something of Dido’s despair, and felt similarly cursed.

Benvenuti a Napoli cries the huge corny poster of the blue bay and ominous Vesuvius that looms over Neil Irish’s sets for Così fan tutte. However, we’re no longer in the Enlightenment city of cynical male experiments in female psychology where Mozart and Da Ponte’s opera of 1790 first took place.

A libertine who deserves punishment makes a good/bad start when a male director decides he really has tried to rape Donna Anna, and doesn't just enjoy post-coital badinage with her. 

“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.