There's no guaranteed route to success with contemporary opera but, ever since Nixon in China, topicality and realism have become the most favoured and trusted paths to some kind of favourable outcome. Two chamber operas, receiving their English premiere at the Linbury Studio Theatre on the weekend, joined this ever-expanding modern school of verismo. 

Samuel Johnson’s description of opera as an exotic and irrational entertainment might well have been written after a performance of Borodin’s Prince Igor, give or take a hundred years or so. Of all great operas – and it is one – this must be one of the most colourful and most confused. Which is no doubt why it is very seldom staged, and why I thought it worthwhile to go to Hamburg to catch up with David Pountney’s new production at the Staatsoper in the city of Brahms, who was born in the same year as Borodin and never even tried to write an opera.

Dissatisfied housewives who eventually stand by their men joined jewelled hands in a divine evening of operatic decadence. Suppressed Bianca all but steps over the body of her strangled lover to get at the muscles of her killer husband in Zemlinsky’s A Florentine Tragedy, taking its cue from the deep purple imagery of Oscar Wilde’s story. And in Richard Strauss’s Die Frau ohne Schatten (The Woman without a Shadow), the Dyer’s Wife readily gives up her dreams of sacrificing motherhood and taking up with a fantasy toyboy when domestic violence looms.

Reviewing the Buxton Festival production of Handel’s Jephtha on theartsdesk a couple of months ago, Philip Radcliffe complained that the director, Frederic Wake-Walker, had done too little to justify the staging of this, the composer’s last oratorio: had made it, that is, too static and unstagey. I wonder what Radcliffe would say about Katie Mitchell’s production for Welsh National Opera, revived this weekend by Robin Tebbutt, and a classic case of a director’s reluctance to allow an essentially statuesque, slow-moving work its natural space and pace.

Pick the right dream, and you just might retrieve a precious memory, even in nightmarish terrain where everyone else has lost theirs. That message seems to have been uncannily prophetic for Bohuslav Martinů, who began work on Julietta in 1936, soon to face the terrifying clean slate of a longer exile from his beloved Czechoslovakia with the onset of the Second World War. The pity and the pain of severance are already there in this seething operatic adaptation of Georges Neveux's crammed-to-bursting dream play.

After the all-singing, all-dancing, all-helicoptering brilliance of Stockhausen Mittwoch aus Licht, the dry routine of an opera in concert didn't seem a very enticing prospect.  That's the problem with this year's Cultural Olympiad. We're becoming very spoilt by it. What should have been a mouth-watering prospect - a fantastic cast performing a great opera - suddenly began to feel run-of-the-mill when compared to the once-in-a-lifetime event that was Mittwoch. But my concerns were short-lived.

Ravel composed only two operas, both one-acters, widely separated in time, superficially very different, but both in a way about the same thing: naughtiness. In L’Heure espagnole (1911), the clockmaker’s wife, Conceptión, entertains a succession of would-be lovers in her husband’s absence. In L’Enfant et les sortilèges (1924), the little boy who won’t do his homework, who smashes the teapot, pulls the cat’s tail and rips the wallpaper, suddenly finds his victims coming to life and scaring him to death.

Not all geese are swans, and not all Handel oratorios are like Messiah – storyless, spiritual, monumental sequences of reflective arias and choruses. By definition, though, they aren’t operas either, and it’s always a calculated risk to put them on the stage, as Iford Arts are doing with Susanna, a quasi-oratorio that Christopher Hogwood has described as “a pastoral opera verging on the comic”.

Last night's concert performance of Berlioz's Les Troyens was not a Prom for the fainthearted. After all, if sitting through a five-hour opera had been a daunting undertaking for the Covent Garden audiences last month - who could also enjoy David McVicar's eye-catching staging - then it was inevitable that anyone seated in the Royal Albert Hall for the visually pared-down version was expecting to feel very culturally virtuous by the end of the night.

Purcell certainly doesn’t make it easy for the champions of English opera. His beloved Dido and Aeneas is barely half an evening’s entertainment, so condensed is its tragedy, and the dense political satire of Dryden’s King Arthur text all but requires translation if it is to make sense to a contemporary audience. And then there’s The Fairy Queen – the gauzy, gorgeous semi-opera whose music is the side-dish to a bastardised 17^th-century take on Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.