It’s a brilliantly sunny January afternoon amidst a general drama of rain at an industrial park outside Aix-en-Provence, and members of a production team are gathering for the first time in the back yard of the festival’s rehearsal studios. Some have met earlier, and three of the five singers who’ll be arriving shortly know each other thanks to the connections already made through the European Network of Opera Academies.

Having been bowled over by the total work of art English National Opera made of Wagner’s The Mastersingers of Nuremberg on its first night, I bought tickets immediately afterwards for the final performance. So I’m off tonight to catch the farewell of what has been an unqualified triumph for the company. Yet only last Thursday an unsolicited email arrived from Amazon Local – there’s no stopping them, it seems – offering tickets for this very show at 40 per cent discount.

Søren Nils Eichberg’s new opera Glare is advertised as a “taut” thriller. It’s actually a short thriller. Big difference.

The question of whether or not opera – a medium that wouldn’t win any prizes for sprinting –  can successfully pull off a thriller – a genre that lives and, more often, dies in its dramatic agility and lightness of foot – is a very real one. I’ve never seen it succeed yet, but would be delighted to be proved wrong. Glare, unfortunately, is not that proof.

You’d expect a regional opera company to focus on the core repertoire in these economically challenging times. Happily, Opera North’s La traviata is a new staging and not a weary revival. Alessandro Talvi’s production doesn’t take many risks and shouldn’t offend anyone, but the whole is beautifully designed, well-acted and handsomely sung.

If you only ever listened to opera from recordings, you might overlook the fact that it's as much theatre as it is music. In the opera house on the night, it's all well and good for the orchestra to play the score and the singers to sing their parts, but on top of that you have to allow for costume changes, move the scenery, adjust the lighting and make sure you get all the right people on and off stage at the appropriate moments. It's what makes opera the living, breathing, sometimes splendidly chaotic spectacle it is.

Buxton has gone Bohemian, digging into Dvořák’s treasure trove and celebrating Gluck’s tercentenary. The choice of Dvořák’s The Jacobin fits the Buxton Festival tradition of rooting out neglected works, since this has been unjustly overlooked since the first performance in 1889. It’s an irony that this makes Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice an unexpected choice, being ever-popular since 1762. However, artistic director Stephen Barlow has linked them for the festival’s two new home-grown productions for this, the 36th festival.

Speaking from the stage before curtain-up on The Barber, Longborough’s founder and chairman, Martin Graham, stressed the hard work put in by director Richard Studer and conductor Jonathan Lyness on their two 2014 productions, this one and Tosca. He wasn’t kidding. Read the programme and you find (for both operas): director, Richard Studer; designer, Richard Studer; costume, Richard Studer. Lyness conducting both works.

Can it really be 12 years since Antonio Pappano inaugurated his transformative era as the Royal Opera’s Music Director conducting Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos? Christof Loy’s production seemed so radical at the time.

Grange Park Opera has a strong penchant for French repertoire, and has been valiant, consistent and highly imaginative in presenting it ever since 1998, when Wasfi Kani and Michael Moody first started inviting opera-goers to the unique setting of a Greek revival house in the Hampshire countryside. This year's production  of Massenet's 1909 Don Quichotte is the eighth French work which the company has produced. Samson et Dalila next year will be the ninth.

“Assez vu” (“seen enough”) is the first line of Benjamin Britten’s last Rimbaud setting in his electric song cycle Les Illuminations. Victor Hugo and Paul Verlaine had been the objects of his 14-year old attention in the Quatre Chansons françaises; later he made typically quirky arrangements of French folksongs. Les Illuminations has certainly been seen and heard enough in concert halls around Europe, even if you can never have too much of music as fresh as this. Britten loved the continent and the idea of the European Union.