Ditch the divers, the video-projected sea and the Relevance with a capital R of ENO's production last season - which managed all three very well indeed - and what remains of Bizet's Pearl Fishers in concert (and in French)? Three ravishing arias, three passionate duets, orchestration and harmony of a subtlety way beyond the plot's cod-oriental hokum: that's enough to begin with. Put Royal Opera music director Antonio Pappano, master of exquisite colour and winged phrasing in French music, in charge of orchestra, chorus and two-and-a-half top singers, and you're in for a treat.

People always overlook how much of a hippie Richard Wagner was intellectually. His philosophical stance differs little from that of Neil from The Young Ones. It's a side of Wagner you can't get away from in Tristan und Isolde, with its endless railing against temporal realities and its search for universal oneness - yeah man, oneness.

One after the other they came. Stunning aria after stunning aria. Affecting in their harmonies, infectious in their rhythms, arresting in their textures, vivid in their melodies. The Royal Opera had taken a mighty gamble with Agostino Steffani's 300-year-old Niobe, Regina di Tebe, a forgotten opera by a forgotten composer. But they were completely right to do so. For Niobe is a masterpiece. And last night's performance was a triumph.

Opera spends so much of its time killing off female protagonists that it's refreshing to come back to The Makropulos Case. In it Janáček, in one of his many moments of generosity, imagines what might happen if you allowed a woman not just to live but to live forever. The answer? They become a bloody nightmare.

Gounod's Faust is many things: vaudeville act, sentimental romance, Gothic tragedy, Catholic catechism, in short, a wholly unrealistic but winningly schizophrenic work that should be taken about as seriously as an episode of Sunset Beach. Director Des McAnuff's attempt to marshal this melodrama into revealing truths about Nazism, war crimes and the morality of modern science was always going to be a bit ambitious.

I suppose it was inevitable after their magnificent high with Meistersinger in the summer that Welsh National Opera’s next production in Cardiff’s Wales Millennium Centre would be a let-down. But one hardly expected a crash-landing quite as spectacular as their new Fidelio, which looks, sounds and feels like a show thrown together with a scratch cast, a weary orchestra, and a director who was shown the score for the first time last Tuesday.

I suppose it was inevitable after their magnificent high with Meistersinger in the summer that Welsh National Opera’s next production in Cardiff’s Wales Millennium Centre would be a let-down. But one hardly expected a crash-landing quite as spectacular as their new Fidelio, which looks, sounds and feels like a show thrown together with a scratch cast, a weary orchestra, and a director who was shown the score for the first time last Tuesday.

There’s something deliciously extravagant about this Pinocchio by composer Jonathan Dove and librettist Alasdair Middleton. It’s remarkably faithful to Carlo Collodi’s picaresque text, and so we get everything. Elaborately costumed characters enter with spectacular props, then disappear having barely made their point, my favourite being the four top-hatted black rabbits who threaten to escort Pinocchio offstage in a coffin after he’s refused to take his medicine.

Anticipating revivals of productions that were hardly vivacious in the first place, you can always find reasons to hope. Perhaps there'll be a dazzling house debut. Maybe someone, preferably the revival director, will bring a more focused individual zest to the kind of rough character sketches Jonathan Miller leaves flailing around his beautifully conceived historic locales. Not on this occasion.