When you're young, you think that liking Elgar is a habit you'll grow into later in life, like buying a set of golf clubs or following The Archers in detail. As I shuffle into middle age, I find that I'm beginning to love this music more and more. I've given up making excuses to younger, hipper friends. Richard Farnes' intense account of Elgar's disconcerting Second Symphony was a great performance, one in which intense dynamism served to accentuate the score's lingering, fin de siècle nostalgia.

From the strange, stuttering opening to its elegiac, drawn-out coda, this is an exquisite, lovingly realised staging of Britten's last opera. It's so good that it amplifies any doubts that you might have about this peculiar, distinctly unlovable piece.

All starts with a barely perceptible bass rumble, before Britten’s lower strings begin their queasy glissandi, shifting key signature every few seconds. It’s a wonderful operatic opening, here teased out with deft mystery by conductor Stuart Stratford.

Newcomers to this ongoing Ring cycle would be wrong to imagine that a series of semi-staged concert performances represent a downsizing, a half-hearted stab at Wagner production. The decision to perform the operas in Leeds’s vast Town Hall was made in part for practical reasons, namely that the Grand Theatre’s orchestra pit is too small to accommodate the large forces required. One or two minor niggles aside, Opera North’s approach has been a consistent triumph.

Staging Britten’s third opera in the round in a small performance space of the Howard Assembly Room makes complete sense. Albert Herring’s supporting cast of village grotesques are that little bit more oppressive when they’re singing yards away from your face. The effect is nicely claustrophobic too – after this, you somehow can’t imagine seeing this opera in a conventionally-sized opera house. And it means the audience get close to the great Dame Josephine Barstow, who as Lady Billows will be a draw for many.

Perhaps the real heroes of David Bruce and Glyn Maxwell’s new, family-friendly opera are the overhead projectors wielded by puppeteers Steve Tiplady and Sally Todd. They’re put into action as soon as the music starts, shining a charming homemade credit sequence onto a screen seemingly made from an old bedsheet.

“All we do is talk!” complains the unnamed protagonist in Poulenc’s brilliantly concise one-act opera La Voix Humaine, a faithful setting from late on in the composer’s career of Cocteau’s 1930 play. Banter is what you don’t get; the heroine’s dialogue with her former lover is conducted via an unreliable landline. The audience hears only one side of the conversation. It’s a chilling, emotionally charged piece – though the latent naturalism is slightly undercut by the unseen presence of a full orchestra underscoring every move.

The overpowering nastiness of Shakespeare’s source material is offset by Verdi’s sublime, impeccably judged music; this is a wonderful opera with barely a dud moment. Trust the score, get decent singers and an understanding, intelligent conductor, and everything should be fine.

Has any other composer managed to pack so much into such a compact time span? You’d recognise this score as vintage Janáček after hearing just a few seconds – those yawning gaps between muted tuba and piccolo, the frantic, unforgiving string writing. Minimalist motifs scurry, circle, always on the verge of delivering an exultant peroration, which, frustratingly, rarely materializes. The Makropulos Case is full of music like this. Disappointment evaporates quickly as the next orgiastic climax builds.

You leave Opera North’s new Faust buzzing and bleary-eyed. The production sounds glorious, with terrific singing. It’s also blessed and cursed with a visually astonishing staging which thrills only slightly more than it infuriates. This company’s cheeky Carmen update annoyed many in 2011, and their take on "the second most popular French opera" will leave some spectators perplexed.