A monstrous celebration prefaced by thunderous organ chords is always going to be more the Albert Hall’s kind of thing than a comic opera viewed through the wrong end of the telescope. So Strauss’s Festival Prelude kicked off a first half of 150^th birthday celebrations in more appropriate style than last week’s Der Rosenkavalier.

If last year’s Ring cycle triumphantly proved that world-class opera can be done at the Albert Hall, this Rosenkavalier suggests that the less epic end of the repertoire isn’t such a sure thing. That is not to say that this performance was dud, far from it; rather that its few problems were venue related. Balance was the main issue, though Robin Ticciati did a great job of whipping the London Philharmonic Orchestra into a passionate frenzy in the Prelude and then taking things down a notch and keeping them there to avoid engulfing the voices.

This was a rare outing by the World Orchestra for Peace, which has performed fewer than 20 concerts since the death of its founder Sir Georg Solti in 1997. UNESCO had designated this BBC Prom as "The 2014 Concert for Peace", the definite article implying a uniqueness which - according to rumour - is because concerts planned for Munich and Aix failed to get beyond the planning stage. It drew a respectable house to the Royal Albert Hall, which looked about three-quarters full.

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.

Richard Strauss was born in Munich 150 years ago today. Christian Thielemann is celebrating the fact by conducting the Staatskapelle Dresden in the juiciest of all-Strauss operatic potpourris, a festive concert to be held in the city’s glorious Semperoper. What wouldn’t I give to hear Anja Harteros, alongside Anne Schwanewilms the loveliest of Strauss sopranos, and chaste nymph Daphne’s metamorphosis into a laurel in a peerless operatic epilogue? In fact the Dresden Music Festival, my host, ended yesterday and seems to function as a separate entity with its own period-instrument orchestra.

If the Hungarian State Opera wanted to demonstrate that it is now back on top form, it could not have chosen a better way than this six-opera celebration of Richard Strauss’s 150^th anniversary. Mahler conducted here before moving to Hamburg, Vienna and New York. Filled with new ambition, after a contractual shake-up under General Manager Szilveszter Ókovács, Budapest displays revitalised strength and amazing depth in all departments.

A trio of Rosenkavaliers: what more could one want as we near Richard Strauss’s 150^th birthday? Well, more of the less often performed operas, for a start. But as this is the Straussian cornucopia, it’s not going to tire those of us who love it beyond reason, and Andris Nelsons’ concert performance with his devoted City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra eventually delivered as much in its rather peculiar way as the Barbican excerpts earlier this month and Richard Jones’ gobsmackingly original, disciplined take at Glyndebourne.

It’s certainly different from the Glastonbury shuttle, I’ll tell you that. I’m sitting with Finetime on the minibus that takes festival-goers from Lewes Station to the opening day of Glyndebourne Opera Festival 2014.

Finetime’s looking very much the peacock today, a suit of many colours and he’s even wearing an earring with a blue feather. I clank my Asahi beer against his.

“The first of too many,” I say.

What spontaneous use might a silver rose take on after its formal presentation by a chubby cherub of a cavalier to a bartered bride-to-be? This and a thousand other score-co-ordinated details are things you never can predict in the hands of that chameleonic yet rigorous director Richard Jones. He throws out most of the meticulous stage directions in Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s rococo libretto for Richard Strauss and finds his own. You may not like them – I mostly did – but you can’t say that this isn’t quality work in tandem with a team of near-ideal Glyndebourne singers and beautifully if often unobtrusively paced conducting of the London Philharmonic Orchestra by Robin Ticciati.

Jones gets you thinking, as always, about the myriad implications of a musical fantasia composed in 1910, looking back to the 1740s and perfectly capable of taking on 1930s film references (Marlene Dietrich as Catherine the Great is one of many striking templates). Much of the strictly choreographed action, with input from Sarah Fahie and performers in straight lines downstage, is counterintuitive to the naturalism Hofmannsthal had in mind, but it works if you let it.The re-imaginings are sometimes dark, always done with the light touch recommended by the opera’s principal character, the 30-something Marschallin with her consciousness of passing time. (Pictured below, Kate Royal's Marschallin with Tara Erraught as Octavian playing maid Mariandel.)

Let’s start with the stage coup that sets up her soliloquy on that theme, extracting a general meditation on instability from the prospect of a middle-aged man marrying a young girl for money and her own situation as the lover of a teenage boy. She’s not alone; a bald, bespectacled, bearded gentleman with a notebook materializes at the back of the room. The minute she lies down on the long couch, we get the reference. There are ripples of knowing mirth in the audience, but only for a few seconds while the chamber orchestra sets up its “once upon a time” framework. As Kate Royal, unpredictably poised and diamantine as the opera's heart and soul once the fluttery vibrato settles, launches into her meditation on how this young girl doomed to a churlish older man is just like her younger self, we listen. You can hear a pin drop in the silences Ticciati judges so well, and time stands still with her monologue on stopping all the clocks, as it has the minute she’s observed that her hairdresser has “made an old woman” out of her.

What women are made of by men is a crucial theme of the opera, even if Strauss and Hofmannsthal’s pre-feminist stance never allows the social straitjacket to be loosened. The Marschallin first appears stark naked under a shower, Venus Anodyomine – the first surprise, no bed onstage for the sex scene of the orchestral prelude, where the only rumpled sheets on the first night were in the orchestra, soon smoothed as Ticciati got the players under flexible control. Our gracious lady’s styles are dictated by an accordion-card of fashion plates, deliciously mirrored (all is symmetry in a Jones production) by the semi-clad girlie pictures unfolded by Baron Ochs’s lunkish retinue to the climax of the famous Act Two waltz. Sophie, the horse at a dealers’ fair, is made to stand on a table while bids are placed; did the Marschallin realize that sending her own lover was the girl’s only chance of escape?

There are no boring bits, which may delight the many folk who dread the Act Three masquerade in a louche tavern. Jones is the master of making sticky operatic moments work, as his party scene for Tchaikovsky’s Queen of Spades spookily proved. This is inspired, too, and it made me cry with laughter. Mimi Jordan Sherin’s lighting, the Dayglo designs of Paul Steinberg, and Nicky Gillibrand's hybrid costumes do their genius work setting up the Baron’s discomfiture as the hired helps do weird routines and a noose drops from the triangular ceiling. There are three doors, too – all we need to set up a climactic trio which Jones leaves well alone, other than a sudden look from the older woman to the younger. After it, Sophie goes to follow the Marschallin as if magnetized, then Octavian does the same. The most wrenching moment in the final scene belongs not to the renunciatory Marschallin but to Sophie, as she crumples in despair at the thought that her new love has just walked out of the door for good.

Do we believe in Tara Erraught’s naughty, dimpled little Cupid as the 17-year-old lover of the experienced Marschallin? Not really, though that may be part of the intended weirdness, and her vocal ardour, if often pressed to sharpness, is informed by meaningful physical gestures at each point (everyone knows how to lead, and be led by, their hands). What a funny, lovable mug, too. She/he is utterly convincing when lovestruck at first sight by a spirited virgin in Act Two (pictured above with Teodora Gheorghiu's Sophie). The scenes between the rosebearer and his circumscribed object of desire (Gheorghiu, perfectly spirited if vocally a little pale at times) are among the best, beautifully detailed as their second duet gives way to the apprehension by intriguers Valzacchi (Christopher Gillett) and Annina (Helene Schneiderman, wonderfully weird in the letter scene and when she apes a discarded peasant “wife”).

Lars Woldt’s Ochs is riveting and original: not repulsive, as he too often can be, but genuinely funny, uncouth and Bunterish in his Austrian country wear. We begin to sympathise as, bum-sore and humiliated, he takes up a position on the couch in nouveau-riche Faninal’s proto-fascistic hallway as self-protective as the Marschallin’s in the previous act – though a glass of wine or three stop him resorting to her foetal position (Woldt pictured above with Helene Schneiderman's Annina). Vocally, it’s a nuanced performance – and the first time I’ve heard “heu”, in the phrase “you must have a haystack in the vicinity”, sung on a high note piano as Strauss asks. Very well, no bottom C in Act One, but you can't have quite everything.

This is the biggest voice on stage, but the others don’t have to battle since Ticciati keeps the glinting, jewel-studded orchestra down as a magic carpet, stupendous in the velvety conspiratorial tarantella that launches Act 3, and vitally rosy for the last 20 minutes. The singing may be variable but the performances aren’t: everyone is there to serve Jones’s off-kilter and unyielding slice of story-telling, down to Miranda Keys’ opulent-sounding, red-wigged duenna, Alun Rhys-Jenkins as Faninal’s insistently sinister Major-Domo and the non-singing charactacterisations of Joseph Bader as Ochs’s tall, goofy bastard son, bemused but ultimately dazzled as we all are by Andrej Dunaev’s Italian Tenor and of Daniel Francis-Swaby as a winningly Marschallin-struck adolescent Mohammed (pictured above with Royal's Marschallin).

So out with every drop of tired old business, in with the new order. In an utterly natural and admirable speech before the Prelude, Glyndebourne chatelain Gus Christie told us how his dear, recently departed old dad George might have had something to say about certain aspects, but would have gone with it. Go with it, too, and you’ll be tickled as well as touched and amazed.

• Read more opera reviews on theartsdesk

MORE RICHARD STRAUSS ON THEARTSDESK

Der Rosenkavalier, Royal Opera (2009). Uneven revival of John Schlesinger’s 25-year-old production

Capriccio, Grange Park Opera (2010). Lively staging, stylish singing and a welcome intrusion of wartime reality

Salome, Royal Opera (2010). Angela Denoke's mercurial Salome (pictured below by Clive Barda) shimmers in Strauss's monstrously beautiful opera

Ariadne auf Naxos, Welsh National Opera (2010). Hoffmansthal's libretto is all about fidelity. This updating is faithful, up to a point

Intermezzo, Scottish Opera (2011). Soprano Anita Bader graces a Klimtian take on Richard Strauss's domestic comedy

Die Frau ohne Schatten, Mariinsky Opera (2011). Strauss's massive fairy tale makes a rare outing in Gergiev’s musically strong venture at the Edinburgh Festival

Der Rosenkavalier, English National Opera (2012). David McVicar and Edward Gardner deliver a riveting account of Strauss's popular opera with Amanda Roocroft as the Marschallin

Intermezzo, Buxton Festival (2012). Fine style in Strauss's comedy-with-feeling

Ariadne auf Naxos, Glyndebourne Festival Opera (2013). Strauss's opera reluctantly enters the Battle of Britain courtesy of a young German director

Capriccio, Royal Opera (2013). Renée Fleming leads superlative cast in concert performance of Strauss's operatic debate

Elektra, Royal Opera (2013). Revival with Christine Goerke in the title role hits the horrid heart of the matter in Strauss's poleaxing masterpiece

Die Frau ohne Schatten, Royal Opera (2014). Compelling dream-interpretation of Strauss's myth graced by fine singing and Semyon Bychkov’s conducting

Salome, BBC Proms (2014). Nina Stemme stuns with Donald Runnicles and the Deutsche Oper Berlin in a giddying account of Strauss's incredible score at the Proms

Ariadne auf Naxos, Royal Opera (2014). Two nymphs are the real revelation in this revival of evergreen hybrid

Salome, Symphony Hall, Birmingham (2015). Lise Lindstrom steals the show from Karabits and Bournemouth SO as a sensual Strauss anti-heroine in concert

Der Rosenkavalier, Royal Opera (2016). Robert Carsen's handsome production with Renée Fleming is elevated by superb orchestral playing

Overleaf: watch Tara Erraught sing Sesto's aria 'Deh, per questo istante' from Mozart's La clemenza di Tito

Poised when I met him six weeks ago between 40th anniversary celebrations of  the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, of which he has been a shaping chief conductor for the past five years  and putting his new music directorship of Glyndebourne into action, Robin Ticciati hardly seemed like a man in positions of power, more an idealistic youth with a touch of the dreamer softening a powerful intellect.