It’s a good year to be Handel-lover. No sooner have summer runs of Rodelinda (Garsington) and Saul (Glyndebourne) finished than we’re into autumn and Opera North’s Susanna, Giustino at the Royal Opera’s Linbury Theatre, with Ariodante still to come on the main stage.

This was always going to be Jakub Hrůša’s night, his first at the Royal Opera since performances of Wagner’s Lohengrin won him the role of Antonio Pappano’s successor as Music Director, which he takes up at the beginning in the 2025/6 season.

Having all but sunk one seemingly unassailable opéra comique, Bizet’s Carmen, director Damiano Michieletto goes some way to helping out another with so many problems. Not far enough, alas, but the chosen edition, with its reams of recitative (mostly not by Offenbach), doesn’t help. Nor does the theme of women as either dolls, angels or devils. The real Hoffmann did it all so much better.

The Mad Hatter gets it about right when he tells Alice: “You’re entirely bonkers… but all the best people are.” Kate Prince takes this line and runs with it in her riotous but surprisingly sweet and often moving hip hop take on Lewis Carroll’s 1865 book, a production now enjoying a 10th anniversary revival, coinciding with a revival of Christopher Wheeldon’s three-act Alice ballet in the Covent Garden main house.

The shadow of Nosferatu hangs heavily over Tim Albery’s powerfully austere staging of Wagner’s opera of desire and damnation, which returns to the Royal Opera House 15 years after it premiered there. Bryn Terfel’s Dutchman is a subtly vampiric figure with his grey clothes and pallid face – an escapee from an Expressionist film hollowed out by his spiritual torment.

Choosing a limited best seems almost meaningless when even simply the seven operatic experiences I've relished in the run-up to Christmas (nothing seasonal) deserve a place in the sun. But in a year which has seen Arts Council devastation versus brilliant business as usual where possible, English National Opera – faced with “Manchester or die” – needs the first shout-out for doing everything the moneygivers want it to.

At a time when every other theatre is offering an alternative Christmas show, what to make of the Royal Opera House’s first collaboration with Lost Dog, aka director-choreographer Ben Duke, who has come up with the most un-merry topic imaginable? Meet Medea, the vengeful sorceress of Greek myth, who butchered her brother, nobbled her ex’s new bride and murdered her own children. The Wind in the Willows this is not.

A blink-and-you’ll-miss-it domestic farce and a fever-dream fantasy of a song-cycle: Stravinsky’s Mavra (1922) and Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire (1912) make for an unexpected double-bill. But, if the two stand slightly awkwardly next to one another, they are both facing in the same direction – each looking back into the musical past.

In a week that saw the Royal Opera House lit up in the colours of the Ukrainian flag and its orchestra playing the Ukrainian national anthem, many theatres and concert halls found ways to express their sympathy for that country’s desperate plight.

“After black and gloomy night, the sun shines all the brighter,” sings hero Ariodante after a life-threatening bout of jealousy nearly scuppers a royal wedding. There’s a snag in Handel’s dramaturgy: all that sunshine in preparation for the nuptials in Act One isn’t really earned.