Human sacrifice and long-term reconciliation are serious matters for music-drama. Not that you'd know it from Handel's pasticcio or confectionary of previous operatic hits, nor from Gerard Jones's one-note production. For strip-cartoon violence Tarantino-style you need panache, and there’s little of that here. Interesting, too, that Handel gets hardly a look-in throughout the interview Jones the Younger gives in the programme. More important, does he serve the fledgling dramatic abilities of fellow trainees on the Royal Opera's Jette Parker Young Artists Programme?

The Tales of Hoffmann is a young man’s piece, full of melodic energy and helter-skelter narrative thrust. We tumble from love affair to love affair, lusting, losing and leaving three women in barely three hours, before taking peevish refuge in the comforts of art. John Schlesinger’s 1980 production may have its visual compensations, but lively it ain’t (barely alive at all, at times), and now on its eighth revival is looking decidedly arthritic. Thanks to tenor Vittorio Grigolo, however, it’s sounding pretty damn fine.

Given the horrors lurking in the composer’s more familiar operas, the warning that Maria de Rudenz is “perhaps the darkest of Donizetti’s tragedies” carries no little weight. A Gothic spectacular with echoes of The Castle of Otranto and Matthew Lewis’s The Monk, Maria’s dramatic excess is tempered by a fine score, full of atmospheric chorus writing and some particularly lovely arias for baritone.

Handel’s Alcina is about sex, certainly. But unlike Olivia Fuchs’s new production for the Royal Academy of Music, it’s about an awful lot of other things as well. Power, illusion, ageing, love, gender, family, intimacy – all these themes find themselves transformed on Alcina’s magical island, reworked by the end into ideas that are altogether darker and more complicated. But there’s nothing complicated about this vision.

Even that most unpredictable of fantasists Nikolay Gogol might have been surprised to find his Nose, wandering far from the face of Collegiate Assessor Kovalyov, sung by a high tenor in an unlikely operatic adaptation of his wackiest story.

"That cursed mist" may hide the French from the crew of the HMS Indomitable and cause far more deadly damage to moral certainty. But clarity and strength are the assets of Orpha Phelan's new production for Opera North: no gimmicks, superb company work and three principals for the battle of good and evil all equal to their dramatic challenges at a level I haven't seen for decades.

What would Glyndebourne, staging Madama Butterfly for the first time, bring to Puccini's most heartbreaking tragedy? Subtle realism, perhaps? Certainly the composer, along with his superb librettists Giacosa and Illica, offers plenty of opportunities. Yet director Annilese Miskimmon botches nearly every significant moment, and it's surely her fault if her three principals are as wooden as the suggestion of lacquered trees dominating the sets.

Purcell’s The Fairy Queen is a riddle to which directors must find an answer. The problems posed by a work whose theatrical characters have no foothold in the musical interludes, whose text is an awkward composite of almost-Shakespeare and not-at-all-Shakespeare, whose unedited action can easily swell to a will-sapping four hours are not to be underestimated, but to address them by adding further narrative layers, further dramatic frames and meta-theatrical flummery is at best questionable and at worst wilful.

Just two thirds of Puccini’s Il Trittico still makes for an involving evening’s entertainment. Without Gianni Schicchi there’s an awful lot of misery and heartache, though director Michael Barker-Caven does manage to inject some black comedy into this revival of Il Tabarro, originally directed by David Pountney in 2004.

Pace-perfect musical articulation and meaningful surprises in the direction: both were to be expected after the conductor-generated sludge and the production overkill of the new Royal Opera Così fan tutte. Mark Wigglesworth has form in Mozart at ENO, with the best of Cosìs way back and a bewitching revival of The Magic Flute this year. Last night he and the ENO Orchestra put no foot wrong. Richard Jones, his dream first-time collaborator, offered the expected twists and symmetries though perhaps not all the connections in between.