The great Marilyn Horne used to joke that she was going to release an album entitled “Chestnuts for Chest Nuts”. She never did, but that leaves the door wide open for Sonia Prina whose dark, thrillingly low sound marks her out as the real deal, a genuine contralto. But the excitement of Prina in performance isn’t just about her extraordinary skill at using her unusual range.

Which musical calendar year isn’t laden down with composer commemorations, too often a pretext for lazy and unimaginative planning? The last 12 months, with Verdi, Wagner and Britten as the birthday boys (in case you failed to hear), have raised the stakes.

Readers who recall the 1872 Paris premiere of Offenbach’s Fantasio have had 141 years to wonder when its British debut would arrive. The long wait ended yesterday when Opera Rara, that valiant and necessary company dedicated to dusting off neglected beauties in concert versions and recordings, joined forces with its Artistic Director Sir Mark Elder and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment.  One flick of the baton and the overture began, with two limpid flutes gracefully dangling arm in arm over the unison cellos’ bass line.

Is anyone else sick of creepy brotherhoods skewering the transcendent in Mozart’s and Wagner’s late operas? Both Sarastro’s cult and the company of the grail are in sore need of change - "fresh blood" would be an unfortunate term under the circumstances - when we first encounter them. But both Simon McBurney’s production of The Magic Flute at English National Opera and now Stephen Langridge’s unleavened Royal Opera Parsifal suggest that these are sects not worth joining or saving.

The most intensive period of music-making I’ll ever experience, celebrating the 100^th birthday of Benjamin Britten in and around his home town, ended on Sunday. I’m an Aldeburgh resident and I attended everything on offer. I thought the best way to provide an overview was to compile a diary of the past four days with a line or two about each event. 

Thursday  21 November (eve of the birthday) 

Three cheers for good old Albert, natural laugh-out-loud heir of Verdi’s Falstaff and Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi, and the best possible way to mark creator Britten’s being one hundred years and one day old. Youth has its day in both those earlier masterpieces, but the lovers are subordinate to the middle-aged comic protagonists. Here they're the equals of a hero who is no scamster but a shy grocer’s boy who busts out drinking and worse to loosen the apron strings of a prim community.

At first it looked like a joke. But, as each muscle spasm, set off by an electric shock, did appear to produce a pained expression in the performer and a subsequent note, one slowly had to accept that these four string quartet players were indeed being electrocuted into performance. The Wigmore Hall, it wasn’t. Sonica, it certainly was.

There’s a scene in Mozart’s most metaphysical opera which Ingmar Bergman, creator of what is still the richest of all Magic Flutes, describes as “at the outermost limit of life”. Hero Tamino seems to have reached a point of no return and no going forward. “When will this darkness end?”, he asks, and voices reply, “Soon, soon or never”.

For a brand-new opera group to set something as ambitious as Don Giovanni before an audience demands sackfuls of self-awareness and confidence. But the eight young singers of Opera Vera are no mere enthusiasts – they are rich in experience and can all boast busy CVs – so it would be discourteous to consider them by anything other than rigorous professional criteria. Given the opera’s countless bear-traps, then, it is not to damn with faint praise to say that they produced an intelligent and thoroughly musical account of Mozart’s score.

You could hardly ask for a better cast than the one assembled for this short run of Wozzeck at the Royal Opera House: Simon Keenlyside in the title role, Karita Mattila, John Tomlinson, Mark Elder in the pit. And at a top price of £65, with many tickets going for much less, this is quite the bargain – not least because the marquee names absolutely nail the performance.