An operatic truism still doing the rounds declares that for Verdi's Il trovatore you need four of the greatest singers in the world. For Don Carlo, his biggest opus in every way, you need six. Nicholas Hytner's Covent Garden staging hits the mark third time around with five, the exception being a very honourable replacement for what would have been an interesting piece of casting.

I’m not one to get misty-eyed over La bohème (unless it be a red mist of rage), but this second revival of Jonathan Miller’s production at English National Opera brought me closer than any yet to understanding the snuffling, lip-quivering reactions of those around me in the Coliseum stalls. And if it wasn’t exactly emotion that got me there, then perhaps it was something even better: sentimental delight in joyous, glorious music-making.

Highly sexed cockerels and cats, a lovesick lion and a ballet of frogs might not seem like a recipe, or rather a menagerie, for profundity. Yet in two ravishing French man (or child)-meets-beast fables for the stage, Poulenc and Ravel are quite capable of tearing at our heartstrings. That they did so unremittingly last night was very largely due to the supernaturally beautiful sounds master conjuror Stéphane Denève drew from the BBC Symphony Orchestra.

Backed up by reasonably adventurous orchestral programming, lucky conductors can forge a strong Stravinsky evening by picking and mixing from his five ancient Greek rituals. Sir John Eliot Gardiner, unintentionally homaging the late Sir Colin Davis who at least in earlier days would have jumped to such a pairing, chose to celebrate his 70^th birthday with the extremes of white balletic lyric poem Apollon musagète and hard-hitting blackest tragedy Oedipus Rex.

It takes a certain kind of artist to book American mezzo-extraordinaire Joyce DiDonato as a supporting act. It’s a risk. Even if you happen to be Juan Diego Flórez. But it’s one that actually paid off on the first night of Flórez’s three-concert residency at the Barbican.

Sunken Garden is described officially as a “film opera”. Two words. Emphatically unhyphenated. No attempt made to neologise or fashion some third-way genre terminology. It’s not a symbol that bodes well for mutually-informed, sensitive interdisciplinary thinking, but in Michael Van der Aa and David Mitchell’s work English National Opera have come one tiny, shuffling step closer to realising that elusive multimedia idée fixe that has so preoccupied the company under John Berry.

A toast to London’s Handel Festival, now celebrating its 36^th year, and to Ian Page’s adventurous Classical Opera Company, for pulling Telemann out of the drawer and placing him in the forefront of this year’s celebrations at St. George’s, Hanover Square. 

Like Prokofiev’s The Love for Three Oranges and Puccini’s Turandot, Wagner’s first opera – The Fairies in English – has its roots in a “theatrical fable” by the 18^th century Venetian playwright Carlo Gozzi. There the resemblances end. Only Prokofiev follows Gozzi’s playful mix of commedia dell’arte and fairy-tale characters. The 20-year-old Wagner has one moment of fun – cut in this performance – but a mere handful of musical gestures and plot devices prophesying greatness to come rises to the surface in this gloopy mess.

“I do not believe in miracles,” scoffs Herodias in Oscar Wilde’s -  and Richard Strauss’s - Salome. “I have seen too many.” I know how she feels. So it was a bit of a shock to find the highest-kicking of today’s composers, John Adams, and his inseparable genius director Peter Sellars, taking the raising of Lazarus seriously in the first part of their latest opera-oratorio (my term, not theirs, and also applicable to El Niño, Adams’s millennial take on Christ’s birth and its concomitant hazards).

Imago, Glyndebourne’s latest Community Opera exercise, putting the cap on 25 years of pioneering educational outreach, is one of those operas where you need to read the programme synopsis first.