The gable end of Martin Graham’s converted barn opera-house at Longborough is surmounted by statues of three composers: pride of place, not surprisingly, to Wagner – the festival’s raison d’être – and with Verdi and Mozart on either side. It’s true one approaches Italian opera here with somewhat less confidence than Wagner.  But it’s refreshing to have it at all, and the new Rigoletto, though patchy, has enough good points to make it worth the visit, if not the detour.

Verdi's La Traviata has become one of the best-loved and most-performed works in the operatic repertoire, but this is no thanks to sections of the English press.

"The darkness deceived me," sings Leonora in Act I as she mistakenly rushes into the arms of the Count di Luna, rather than those of her beloved, the mysterious troubador Manrico who’s been serenading her for nights on end. Seeing Robert B Dickson’s sepulchral lighting in Scottish Opera’s semi-new production of Verdi’s melodramatic shocker Il trovatore – an updated version of the company’s 1992 staging – you can understand why.

You might think you know what you’re in for with a play by Anders Lustgarten, winner of the inaugural Harold Pinter Playwright’s Award and current go-to political activist for the Royal Court and the National. Listed alongside the plays on his CV is the boast that he’s been “arrested in four continents”.

The psych scene is one that has never seemed to really go away since its birth in the mid-60s under the guidance of bands such as the Thirteenth Floor Elevators and Pink Floyd. It may have faded into the background from time to time, but every few years it comes back with something new and interesting added to the recognisable template. Out of the present incarnation of this crowd, which includes the likes of Swedish tribalists Goat, the hypnotic Wooden Shjips and a slew of bands that have featured on the excellent Reverb Conspiracy compilations, comes Italian duo Sonic Jesus.

Filming in bombed locations around Italy and Germany, the immediate evocation of wartime and post-war moral zeros, ordinary Italian locals and American GIs playing themselves alongside professional actors: all these assets would be enough to make Rossellini’s gritty films made between 1945 and 1948 essential to the history of cinema. But cinema as vibrant life itself breathes in the pace and in most of the performances.

This concert is called My Life in Music and the Italian film composer Ennio Morricone seems determined to take us on a journey from his origins in Italian B pictures to inarguable and gigantic orchestral opulence. In the 1960s he put together iconic and resonant music on a tight budget, with limited ensembles and quirky instrumentation. These made his name, along with that of the director Sergio Leone. Tonight, clad in black, wearing a polo-neck, conducting the Czech National Symphony Orchestra and a mighty choir, he revels in hugeness.

"The fantastical should come so close to the real that you must almost believe it," declared Dostoyevsky on Pushkin’s ghostly short story The Queen of Spades. Emmanuel Demarcy-Mota and his superb French ensemble have brought off the feat twice now at the Barbican: two years ago with the pachydermal transformations of Ionesco’s masterpiece Rhinocéros, and now through the intrusion of Pirandello’s nightmare family into a rehearsal of one of his plays.

It’s quite a distance from the first performance of Monteverdi’s operatic cornucopia under the Mantuan Gonzagas’ imperious eye to this democratic celebration at the Roundhouse – 408 years, to be precise. Michael Boyd’s production takes us back even further, to those ancient Greek festivals of poetry and music which inspired the intellectual Florentines to fashion the art of opera in the late 16^th century.

Covent Garden’s masked balls circling around the New Year feature not the seasonal bourgeois Viennese couple and a bat-winged conspirator but a king, his best friend’s wife and – excessively so in this production – the grim reaper. Big voices are what’s needed if it’s Verdi rather than Johann Strauss II, and if we can’t have Jonas Kaufmann, who’s committed his energies to a lesser protagonist, Giordano’s Andrea Chénier, this coming January, then much-trumpeted Maltese tenor Joseph Calleja will have to do.