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.

The Symphony of Psalms, which ended the Philharmonia’s Stravinsky series last night, is an indelible masterpiece, silencing the tired but persistent accusation that Stravinsky’s music is clever but cold. Abstract it may be, but suffused with an exile’s deep longing, spritual hope rising in harmonies of heart-stopping consolation until that final, revelatory C major chord. This performance (with three Swedish choirs) was of focused beauty and searing sincerity; I have never heard better.

There are two ways of reacting to an opera company like WNO staging a musical like Kiss Me, Kate. You can ask yourself whether this is work that an opera house should concern itself with at all. Or you can take Confucius’s advice, and just lie back and enjoy it. Of course you could say the same if WNO put on an air display or a cricket tournament. But at least Cole Porter is sung drama of a kind, which is one definition of opera, and it’s also on the whole enjoyable, though that naturally depends on the how as much as the what.