"Oh, wretched old man! You are but the shadow of the king”, sings Plácido Domingo’s Nebuchadnezzar about himself in Lear-like abjection before his Goneril-Reganish daughter (the flame-throwing Liudmyla Monastyrska). It’s only true of this brief phase in the protagonist’s sketchy operatic trajectory from hubris brought low to piety raised on high.

Does this disc succeed in doing what it sets out to do? Yes, it does, which makes my minor carpings irrelevant. It’s already selling in industrial quantities.

Yes, it's still him all right. Hovering around a disputed seventysomething and bouncing back from a serious operation, Plácido Domingo puts into seemingly smooth gear that beaten-bronze voice in a million and still sounds like the tenor we've known and loved for decades. Which might be a problem in a classic Verdi baritone role, beleaguered Doge of Genoa Simon Boccanegra, were grizzled authority not the keynote. That works, but if only Domingo's towering stage presence had been better harnessed in the umpteenth revival of what was never a very human production by Elijah Moshinsky. This is a singular opera which can seem slow to kindle and then a bit stagey if no truth is to be found in its many confrontations. And sadly there was very little of that last night.

The BBC's opera season is a great idea, even if the results have been variable. Plaudits for Antonio Pappano's zinging Opera Italia must be weighed against a barrage of rotting fruit for Diva Diaries, a farcical extended commercial for soprano Danielle de Niese. And while Stephen Fry is the unsurpassed master of plugging Twitter and iPads, his claimed passion for Wagner doesn't seem to have inspired illuminating insights, let alone any decent jokes.

In the next few weeks the wider public will be introduced to the charms of Rolando Villazón (b. 1972). Anointed as a star of opera houses around the world in the last decade, the Mexican tenor is about to participate in ITV1's Popstar to Opera Star. As singing celebs from the world of pop music take on the big arias, Villazón has been cast as mentor, panellist and figleaf. It is all a very long way from Covent Garden.

How old Placido Domingo? Old Placido Domingo in not bad vocal health, to paraphrase Cary Grant's celebrated telegram reply. The other answer depends on your source of reference. Domingo is 68 in the eyes of last night's rather lazy, over-reverent Imagine, but 75 according to my not so New Everyman Dictionary of Music. Where did that come from? It would make him an octogenarian by the time of the date he proudly announced at the programme's end as the furthest-forward in his singer's diary. Perhaps this isn't that much of an issue.

Frank Johnson, the great parliamentary sketch-writer who died in 2006, was a passionate fan of opera and ballet. While intensely admiring certain artists, he kept eye and pen sharp for his observations of cultural matters, mocking cabals of opinion-formers in the arts as ruthlessly as he quilled politicians. These extracts from a newly published collection of his writings, edited by his widow Virginia Fraser, show both sides of him.

5 March 1989: Benjamin Britten's whimsicalities