First things first. There are limited tickets still available for this run of Peter Grimes on Aldeburgh beach but there won’t be for long, so move fast. You can read the rest of this review later; the next few minutes could make the difference between experiencing one of the most memorable performances of your life and just finding out what you’ve missed out on.

Austere, beautiful, heartbreaking, streaked with genius - that goes for both Benjamin Britten’s last opera Death in Venice and Deborah Warner’s remarkable production of it for ENO, returning all too briefly to the Coliseum, with a superb central performance. Besiege the box office for one of the four remaining performances if you want to see contemporary operatic art refined to its most personal and powerful.

If you were new to contemporary opera, you might think it was forbidden for modern works to be funny. Tragedy is still the default setting for major commissions. You only get serious money if you have serious thoughts and serious music, it seems. At the Royal Opera, the policy is to stage unfunny, ancient buffas on the main stage and sharp, modern ones in the Linbury Studio Theatre. Gerald Barry’s The Importance of Being Earnest is the latest.

The Marriage of Figaro is so much a part of Glyndebourne’s history that it’s sometimes hard to recall the details of this or that production. Michael Grandage’s current staging, though, will be easily remembered for its strong characteristics, both good and bad: for Christopher Oram’s marvellous Alhambra sets, for the brilliance and occasional vulgarity of Grandage’s direction, for its perfection of movement and timing and its almost total obliteration of the social distinctions on which the plot hinges.

In sunshineand bright blue skies there can be few places more green and pleasant than Wormsley Park. Garsington Opera has found a happy home there, with this being its third season in its sleekly rectilinear big top at the Getty family’s Buckinghamshire estate.

Those who knew the composer Jonathan Harvey, who died of motor neurone disease last December, will remember him as the least demonstrative, least theatrical of men. His presence was gentle, soft-spoken, essentially inward – the physical image of the Buddhism that came to dominate his spiritual consciousness in the latter half of his life. That so intensely pure-minded and modest a musician should have been fascinated by a genius as ostentatious and self-advertising as Wagner is one of those attractions of opposites that are the stuff of art.

Although originally commissioned by the Royal Opera House, Benjamin Britten’s opera Owen Wingrave was always intended to be an opera-for-television. Perhaps it’s this unusual pedigree that has scared off potential performances of this little-seen work, perhaps it’s the piece’s awkward drama and barely digested polemic. Either way it’s a shame. This late score is full of Brittenish melodic fragments and orchestral colours, and if the opera house wouldn’t exactly be the poorer for its absence the concert hall certainly would.

There were a small but substantial number of children dotted around the auditorium at the opening night of The Perfect American, and one hopes they hadn’t been led to expect singalong-a-Disney, all bright colours and catchy tunes. The piece takes place in the last few months of Walt Disney’s life, as his diagnosis with late stage lung cancer prompts introspective angst about the meaning of his success and legacy, and the terrible contrast between his own mortality and the agelessness of his creations. The great man’s personal flaws are laid bare.

Apparently Bellini’s I Puritani was Queen Victoria’s favourite opera. That wasn’t quite reason enough for director Stephen Langridge to condemn the cast of his new Grange Park production to this extraordinarily ugly sartorial era, but unfortunately he found his justification nonetheless – looking across the Channel to the scientific explorations and experiments of Paris’s notorious hospital la Salpêtrière.

There are Handel operas where you wait impatiently for the handful of truly original set-pieces to light up the action, hoping the singers are equal to their challenges. One such is surely Siroe, Re di Persia, bravely staged at the Göttingen Handel Festival the other week. Others like Imeneo sparkle with genius and personality in virtually every number, musically if not dramatically the equal of a Shakespeare late romance.