The tale of Orpheus – a musician so talented his art could overturn the laws of the universe – is the originary myth of opera itself. Is it any wonder, then, that it’s a story that the genre continues to tell and retell with such care and fascination? Three versions, spanning almost four centuries from Rossi’s 1647 Orpheus to Little Bulb Theatre’s 21^st-century production, punctuate the current Royal Opera House season, starting with Gluck’s Orphée et Eurydice – seen for the first time in the company’s history in its French reworking.

September is upon us and it’s nearly time for the new season. English National Opera’s Artistic Director John Berry may have left the building but his enterprising legacy lives on in a 2015-16 season that looks on paper as good as any in the past 20 years; what happens after that is anyone's guess. Still, there shouldn’t be too much grief that ENO Music Director Edward Gardner has moved on, since his successor Mark Wigglesworth already has a fine track record with the company.

In 2007, a tiny British theatre company called 1927 staged their first ever show at the Edinburgh Fringe – the darkly reimagined collection of fairytales and fables Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea. Now, almost a decade on, they are back where it all began – not at the Fringe but the Edinburgh International Festival, with their acclaimed Komische Oper production of The Magic Flute.

Thresholds are breached and barred, penetrated and sealed up in Harrison Birtwistle’s beguiling pair of mythological scenas The Corridor and The Cure. Originally commissioned by the Aldeburgh Festival in 2009, The Corridor is paired here for the first time with Birtwistle’s new companion piece, in a production first seen this month at Aldeburgh and now at the Royal Opera House.

How many words would you expect in an average libretto? 10,000? 15,000? Whatever that number is you can triple it and then some for The Virtues of Things – a new opera from Sally O’Reilly and Matt Rogers of astonishing, exhausting, battering wordiness. And with all these extra words what does it have to say? Not a great deal, frankly.

Let’s get one thing straight at the outset: Szymanowski’s 1926 opera Król Roger isn’t a lovely occasional oddity, a rarity whose appeal is largely novelty, or a dust-it-off-once-a-decade sort of piece. It’s that rarest of things, a real and original masterpiece whose worth has been unaccountably undervalued. This new production by Kasper Holten does nothing to obscure its beauty, making a strong case not only for the work’s sensual appeal, but also the larger philosophical architecture underpinning this maverick score.

A journey into dreams through songs from Dowland to The Kinks; a Swiss director who, Covent Garden’s Director of Opera Kasper Holten assures us, is “one of the most important European theatre artists”; a Norwegian chanteuse who, I assure you, is a performer of real originality. All that should add up to something just a little bit extraordinary, shouldn’t it? Sadly not. What I saw last night was the kind of thing I’d shrug off having chosen at random from offerings at the Edinburgh Fringe.

What kind of regime, asks Gérard, talks of justice while killing poets? It’s a question the answer to which suggests itself all too swiftly this week, briefly turning a revolutionary romp of an opera into something rather more chilling. Playing things straight in his new production of Andrea Chénier (if wigs and lavender stockings, chandeliers and pastoral divertissements can be called straight), David McVicar may have missed a trick with a story that speaks with surprising clarity about the violence of political and ideological conflict. Or maybe he didn’t.

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.

When everything works – conducting, singing, production, costumes, sets, lighting, choreography where relevant – then there’s nothing like the art of opera. But how often does that happen? In my experience, very seldom, but not this year. It's been of such a vintage that I couldn’t possibly choose the best out of six fully-staged productions – three of them from our only native director of genius, Richard Jones, who as one of his favourite singers, Susan Bullock, put it to me, deserves every gong going – and one concert performance.