Abandon hope of the human comedy so precisely charted in Hilary Mantel’s related historical fiction The Giant, O’Brien, prepare for a vision of outsized body and soul revealed in sleep, and your patience will be rewarded. Sarah Angliss’s haunting Giant, premiered at last year's Aldeburgh Festival, is perfectly served by her own soundscape, a dedicated team of musicians and Sarah Fahie’s pitch-perfect production.

The shadow of Nosferatu hangs heavily over Tim Albery’s powerfully austere staging of Wagner’s opera of desire and damnation, which returns to the Royal Opera House 15 years after it premiered there. Bryn Terfel’s Dutchman is a subtly vampiric figure with his grey clothes and pallid face – an escapee from an Expressionist film hollowed out by his spiritual torment.

Trials by fire and water pale in comparison with trials by Arts Council England. English National Opera’s long torment has lately involved redundancy notices issued mid-performance and the enforcement of a sub-standard contract for chorus and musicians. Yet here they are, singing and playing their hearts out in an exhilarating reprise of a trusted old favourite: Simon McBurney’s production of The Magic Flute, first staged in 2013 and now on its fourth outing in the capable hands of revival director Rachael Hewer.

We can’t do without Così fan tutte; it’s an irresistible masterpiece. But it’s a thorn in the flesh of modern directors, who struggle to find the "relevance" they seem to need in order to get the wretched piece on to the stage.

Opera in Britain is currently cursed by funders, politicians and ideologues – of right and left – who heartily detest the form. Alas, some directors do their work for them with interpretations seemingly designed to undermine the very art they are employed to serve. English Touring Opera (rare beneficiaries of a recent boost to their public subsidy) have regularly excelled in the past. They will do so again.

An opera about a day in the life of Karl Marx doesn’t exactly sound like a barrel of laughs. But then so much of Jonathan Dove’s witty 2018 work proves that things are not always what they seem, whether that’s through Dove’s jaunty score-writing, Charles Hart’s ingenious  libretto or Jürgen Weber’s drolly imagined scenario.

Opera North have a new pairing for Mascagni’s popular but clichéd Cavalleria Rusticana in this double bill: an early Rachmaninov one-acter, written when he was 19. The production of the former is a revival of the one seen in 2017 in their Little Greats season, and its director then, Karolina Sofulak, has returned to create this Aleko alongside it.

Reviving Tim Albery’s production of Così fan tutte, now almost 20 years old, again at Leeds Grand Theatre, Opera North have a bet that’s as safe as Don Alfonso’s in the story – that “Women are all the same”. It’s a sure-fire winner, and the best part this time round lies in the balance and contrast of both voices and personalities in the casting of the central pairs of lovers.

Never underestimate the enduring power of a great story over an unwieldy operatic setting. Few of us who saw the first ENO production of The Handmaid’s Tale back in 2003 thought the work stood much chance of revival. Yet Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel has justifiably gained even greater hold since then, so here we are on a third run of Poul Ruders’ baggy monster.

Those were happy days back in 2014 when, justifiably flushed with the success of the Royal Opera’s Tristan und Isolde revival, director Christof Loy, music director Antonio Pappano and soprano Nina Stemme mooted possibly the toughest role challenge of them all, that of Strauss and Hofmannsthal’s vengeful obsessive Elektra. Yet nearly a decade is a long time in the life of a dramatic soprano, and on last night’s evidence, it's come too late in London.