It’s a truism that history is written by the victors, but nowhere in classical music is the argument made more persuasively than in the legacy and reputation of Charles Gounod. In a year in which you can hardly move for Bernstein and Debussy-related events, a year in which even Couperin and Parry are getting a good showing, as well as the too-often-neglected Lili Boulanger, the 200^th anniversary of the composer’s birth is passing all but uncelebrated in the UK.

Adam Gorb’s The Path to Heaven, with libretto by Ben Kaye, is his longest work to date (almost two hours’ running time without interval) and on a story that could hardly be more tragic – the Holocaust. Its premiere at the Royal Northern College of Music was conducted by Mark Heron and given by members of Psappha with singers and musicians from the RNCM, directed by Stefan Janski.

First palpable hit of the evening: a full orchestra in the pit under hyper-alert Opera North stalwart James Holmes, saxophones deliciously rampant. Second hit: they've got the miking of the voices right (very rare in West End shows). Third: the first ensemble number, "Another opening, another show", sends spirits soaring. What follows is very good, sometimes excellent, occasionally fresh and startling.

All those pranks, set-ups, fake letters and disguises, they just keep coming thick and fast in Verdi’s Falstaff. The score has irresistible energy and momentum.

Peer at the small print and it’s clear that Berlin to Broadway with Kurt Weill is actually a spruced-up repackaging of a show originally devised by Gene Lerner and arranger Newton Wayland, about whom Opera North’s programme tells us nothing.

Striking it lucky with a successful new opera is a rare occurrence, though every company has a duty to keep on trying. The Royal Opera hit the jackpot with 4.48 Psychosis, a highly original approach to Sarah Kane's profound and authentic play by Philip Venables, the first Doctoral Composer-in-Residence on the scheme initiated by Covent Garden in alliance with the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. How could one not wish his successor, Israel-born Na'ama Zisser, all the best?

If you go to ENO’s Acis and Galatea expecting a grassy knoll draped decoratively with a Watteau shepherdess or two then you may be disappointed. Launched in 2017, the company’s reliably punchy Studio Live strand (stripped-back, small-scale, off-site performances) continues here with Handel’s “little opera”, reinvented for the Instagram age. #Nymphsandshepherds #Flockthis

Juanjo Mena, chief conductor of Manchester's BBC Philharmonic for the past seven years, took his official leave of them with a programme reflecting his great love, the music of his Spanish homeland. Albéniz and Falla, to be precise, and the greater part was a complete concert performance of the latter’s opera La Vida Breve.

What a great show, on every level. David McVicar’s Glyndebourne production of Handel’s Giulio Cesare, originally staged in 2005, and in its third revival this year, has a cast without a weak link, and never fails to draw in the audience to the work’s cycles of power, suffering, death and intermittent triumph. It brings us deep into the mind and essence of every character. And holds us right there.

Stumble across Grange Park Opera’s new brick-clad “Theatre in the Woods”, nestled amid a labyrinth of gardens and orchards next to the rambling Tudor pile of West Horsley Place in Surrey, and on a mild June evening you may feel as if you have fallen into some Home Counties version of a magic-realist novel.