Sometimes operas – even immensely powerful ones – simply don’t make complete sense, and we can see why Dr Johnson dismissed the form as an “exotic and irrational entertainment”. Then again, that sounds fun, and also a fair description of much of Saint-Saëns’s Biblical blockbuster Samson et Dalila. At Covent Garden, in this comeback for Richard Jones’s 2022 production (with Benjamin Davis as revival director), the exotic parts certainly shine.

There are three aspects of English National Opera’s most ambitious project to date in Manchester that demand attention.

“Charges that no court has made will be shouted at my head.” And so it proves. Benjamin Britten’s fisherman Peter Grimes is damned before a note is sung – condemned not by a judge, but by his own community. Deborah Warner’s brutal 2022 staging, now back at the Royal Opera for its first revival, never lets us forget this. We don’t even see a courtroom.

It all adds up to a cleverly interconnected triple bill and the perfect experience for five singers from the Royal Opera's Jette Parker Artists Programme. There are three losses, two of them deaths, only one mourned for, a baritone in all three operas and three other singers in two of them, plus dazzling, finely honed work from various small forces of the Britten Sinfonia under conductor Peggy Wu (also on the JPAP). 

Before last night's still-shocking saga of a downtrodden soul began, Southbank Artistic Director Mark Ball came on to tell us that while concerts were mere events, Multitudes, "our multi-arts festival powered by orchestral music", was offering experiences. Rachel Halliburton, who reviewed Bach's The Art of Fugue with acrobats, would agree; Bernard Hughes, though, found Messiaen's Turangalîla ruined by a "tiresome film".

There’s something slightly odd about listening to Bluebeard’s Castle, Bartók

You know to expect a crazy ride, especially when Gerald Barry, greatest living Wildean and wild one among composers, has flagged up his very unStraussian take on Salome with "I didn't want her to dance, so I thought...not "dance", but "type' "(there are three typewriters of varying ages at the front of the concert platform). Right at the start, with deliberately unwieldy unison galumphings, mostly strings and lower brass, you also know it's him by the style.

Just now, everything WNO does inevitably bears the mark of their Arts Council-imposed financial troubles, and this new Flying Dutchman directed by Jack Furness is no exception. It proceeds on a bare stage largely devoid even of props, the singers costumed in the most mundane modern street-wear, no sign of the sea or ships, nothing beyond a few mysterious period-clad Scandinavians far upstage and some neutral back projections on which the audience is invited - I suppose - to bring their imaginations to bear.

Good Friday and the days before it are times to contemplate Bach's great passions - the St Matthew was performed at the Baden-Baden Easter Festival before I arrived with Klaus Mäkelä conducting the Concertgebouw Orchestra - but not so much another powerful ritual. Britten's War Requiem seared the soul again this Good Friday with the profoundly impressive Joana Mallwitz conducting the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, and it seemed like a masterpiece equal to Bach's.

“Fear death by water,” says the fortune-teller in TS Eliot’s The Waste Land. There were a few moments in Natalie Abrahami’s new production of The Turn of the Screw when I worried that the fine musicianship and otherwise smart direction in evidence all around might founder irrevocably beneath the sodden weight of its core conceit. For long sections, especially in the second act, the singers stand or splash around a waterlogged stage.