Despite ever-more determined attempts by musicologists to broaden the baroque repertoire of our opera houses, Handel still very much has things his own way. But in this Olympic year a sly challenge has emerged from Antonio Vivaldi’s L’Olimpiade – its topical, Games-themed premise garnering it more performances in a single year than in the past 200 put together. Undeniably apt, unquestionably novel, but is the opera actually any good?

Of all Romantic operas, La Bohème is perhaps the one that responds best to what one might, for want of a better phrase, call straight theatrical treatment. It’s pure genre: no hidden meanings, no contemporary significance. “Scenes from the life”, as Murger called his book, now barely readable. Puccini’s opera, likewise, is short on continuity, long on atmosphere, very long on sentiment. Why would anyone bother with it?

 According to Oscar Wilde’s Salome (and faithfully preserved in Hedwig Lachmann’s libretto), the mystery of love is greater than the mystery of death. That may be so, but neither comes close to equalling the baffling mystery that is still David McVicar’s production. Not trusting the simple reds, moons and veils of Wilde’s stylised original to conjure sufficient horror, McVicar takes his abused heroine to Nazi Germany by way of Pasolini and a backstory of physical and psychological trauma. Then he throws in an abattoir and plenty of blood.

Massenet: Werther Rolando Villazón, Sophie Koch, Orchestra of the Royal Opera House/Antonio Pappano (DG)

Rossini's La Cenerentola is not an opera that I'd normally recommend to anyone with even half a brain. It takes the simple if mildly nauseating little tale of Cinderella, pads it out with parental abuse and drawn out cliffhangers, and ends in a pass-the-sick-bag denouement of "Goodness Triumphant". Yet, in an act worthy of the fairy godmother herself, Glyndebourne has transformed the piece into something unmissable. 

Glyndebourne nature, it seems, runs along as smoothly as the much discussed new wind turbine on the hill. Within the theatre, though, all is flux: director Melly Still and Vladimir Jurowski, conducting an incandescent London Philharmonic Orchestra, show just how flexible it's possible to be with the viciousness and the vivacity in Janáček's kaleidoscope of birth, copulation, death and a redemption of sorts in celebration of the natural order.

Welsh National Opera has a good track record with Wagner. Its Meistersinger of two summers ago is already the stuff of legend (and alas not likely to return to reality); farther back one recalls a more than respectable Parsifal, a notable Ring cycle, and an old Tristan under Goodall that’s still talked about in hushed whispers.

Origami birds flock in graceful chorus, a dancer flutters two fans into a pulsing captive butterfly, curtains of cherry blossom descend over glowing paper lanterns, and of course a small bunraku puppet steals the show. Seven years on Anthony Minghella’s Madam Butterfly is as beautiful as ever, and – if possible – even more Japanese.