There are two operatic types who should leave Rossini’s epic swansong for the stage well alone. One would usually be a conductor who ignores many of the notes written by a master at the height of his powers, since even the least dramatic numbers have musical idiosyncrasy in them. Antonio Pappano still omits, among other things, Rossini’s superb Mozartian canon-trio for women's voices and wind ensemble; but what he does conduct is so focused and shapely that he must be forgiven.

Antonio Pappano, artistic director and chief conductor of the Royal Opera House, is a polymath, for he is also a brilliant and persuasive narrator of the history of music. Here he embarked on a four part history of the operatic voice, starting at the very top – or how to reach those high Cs, the Everest for the soprano.

Lagoon, miasma and scirocco may seem as far away as you can get from the rolling hills and pleasant airs of the Wormsley Estate in deepest home counties territory. Nor are the bleached bones of Britten’s bleak if ultimately transformative operatic swansong the usual culinary fare many punters might have expected to go with their fine wines and gourmet picnics.

Verdi's La Traviata has become one of the best-loved and most-performed works in the operatic repertoire, but this is no thanks to sections of the English press.

From “Printemps qui Commence“ (spring is beginning) to “Springtime for Hitler"... that really is quite some intellectual leap. Patrick Mason, an experienced and respected opera director, has uprooted the tale of Saint-Saëns's opera from biblical Gaza, and has placed the first two acts in France somewhere around the time of Jean Renoir's La Grande Illusion, with Warsaw ghetto overtones.

It’s well-known that Wagner shelved The Ring two thirds of the way through in favour of Tristan with the aim of producing something that could be put on quickly in a conventional theatre. Of course, it didn’t quite work out that way. Yet Tristan, for all its technical difficulties, does lend itself to a relatively small stage. Its ensemble scenes are few and manageable, and for the rest it’s basically a conversation piece.

What a difference seven years can make to a budding genius. Mozart’s La finta giardiniera (1775) has only patches of brilliance, and last year’s Glyndebourne production, despite musical excellence, failed them all.

2013 was the year that pop fans were forced to ponder the ethics of “Blurred Lines”. In 2014 classical fans followed suit, when Kasper Holten’s Royal Opera Don Giovanni unapologetically redrew the map of sexual boundaries. Suddenly Donna Anna was sneaking off for a quickie with the Don while her beloved laboriously declaimed “Dalla sua pace” – a willing partner (along with Elvira, Zerlina and all other women to hand) rather than a victim. Now Holten’s Don returns, if not precisely a reformed character, then at least a changed one.

Connections are missed and made in Jonathan Dove’s Flight – a giddy airport fantasy of what might be and what never was. Not yet 20 years old, this contemporary score is quite a departure from Opera Holland Park’s staple fare of well-aged verismo and bloodily rare Italian drama, but in a glossy new production by Stephen Barlow it pulses with all the same urgency and human interest – and not a suicide/secret pregnancy/long-lost parent in sight.

Of the two works by Hans Werner Henze on this curious if ultimately satisfying double-bill, neither quite answers to the name of opera. Henze originally conceived The Country Doctor as a radio opera, that still-rare and unfairly maligned genre, which allowed him to set the whole text as Kafka wrote it, with the doctor a disembodied voice at front and centre, a neutral observer of his own mental disintegration while the imagined events of his long dark night of the soul work their horror around him.