Opera outside London flourishes in the hands of Opera North, Welsh National Opera and Scottish Opera. In 2011 the popular hits such as Carmen, The Merry Widow and La Traviata intermingle with rarer landmarks such as From the House of the Dead, Orlando and Intermezzo. Wagner has a fine showing in the North and West from Opera North and Welsh National Opera.

The beautiful voice is no more. I know the tag has been applied recently to Renée Fleming, but for liquid-gold soprano sound, there has never been anyone to surpass Dame Margaret Price, who died yesterday in her native Wales three months short of her 70th birthday. Few singers have covered a wider range with such poise and style; in the April 2007 edition of the BBC Music Magazine we placed her Number Eight among the Top 20 Greatest Sopranos of All Time (I now recall she was Number Three on my own list, after Callas and Sutherland, of course).

The beautiful voice is no more. I know the tag has been applied recently to Renée Fleming, but for liquid-gold soprano sound, there has never been anyone to surpass Dame Margaret Price, who died yesterday in her native Wales three months short of her 70th birthday. Few singers have covered a wider range with such poise and style; in the April 2007 edition of the BBC Music Magazine we placed her Number Eight among the Top 20 Greatest Sopranos of All Time (I now recall she was Number Three on my own list, after Callas and Sutherland, of course).

The annals of rock’n’roll are littered with complacency, fading stars, and acts who’ve had it and then lost it, forever. So, after 20 years, what makes the Manics different? How come they’re still turning out hit albums? Possibly it’s their hand-on-heart, Welsh-valley principles. Maybe it’s the way they find libraries as interesting a subject as love. Or perhaps it’s the way that they keep recovering from the brink of near self-destruction. Listening to them last night, though, something else became clear.

It's been a while since the pop/punk and post/pre-Richey comparisons have been made. Ironic considering how seemlessly the Manics slip between modes these days. Today theartsdesk brings you an exclusive preview of the live, power-popping video of "Hazleton Avenue", due for release next Monday to coincide with their live digital EP, Some Kind of Nothingness (available on iTunes).

How do young modern choreographers engage with their audience? With references from the street - motion that the audience knows and recognises? With musical expressiveness? With the development of a technical style that has a language of its own? How about with an instinct, a yearning to entertain? Surely not!

Music, Wagner famously pronounced, is the art of transition. For the Swiss composer Michael Jarrell, by contrast, music is “the art of punctuation”. On the one hand, how to get from one thing to the next; on the other hand, how to separate one thing from the next. But in the end the problem is much the same: how do we make sense of large chunks of time that contain nothing but music?

Ariadne auf Naxos, according to its librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal, is all about fidelity: fidelity in love, fidelity in art, fidelity in spirit. Ariadne on her island, abandoned by Theseus, can give herself to Bacchus only by persuading herself that he’s a god. The actress Zerbinetta gives herself to every man in sight, including the Composer (played, incidentally, by a girl), who for a moment weakens in his lofty contempt for these comic actors who intrude on his high ideals with their vulgar songs and dubious humour.

Hofmannsthal could seldom be parted from his deep meanings. All the same the real interest of Strauss’s chamber opera – composed just after Der Rosenkavalier – lies in its theatrical method, which, pre-Pirandello, pre-Turandot, presents an earnest, heroic drama disrupted by irrelevant characters who offer advice to the heroine and do their best to turn the opera seria into street theatre. It’s an entertaining, suggestive idea, but problematic in performance, partly because Strauss couldn’t bring himself to abandon his epic conclusion, which tends to drag on and in the process rather spoils the irony. The finest music comes in the Prologue, backstage before the show, which has the performers popping in and out of their dressing rooms in the best Feydeau manner while the high-minded young Composer laments the looming wreckage of his magnum opus.

This is also much the most enjoyable part of Neil Armfield’s production in this WNO revival at the Wales Millennium Centre in Cardiff. True, he drops Hofmannstal’s beloved 18th century, and with it the whole idea of the grand Viennese palais (which survives nevertheless in the text). Still, Dale Ferguson’s modern theatre-backstage fizzes and crackles with comic vitality while allowing space for those moments where the music speaks, the comedy retreats, Zerbinetta looks into the Composer’s eyes and for about 30 seconds falls in love. Sarah Connolly, in the travesty role of the Composer, is wonderfully touching in these episodes, and Gillian Keith (pictured right with a suited Connolly) as Zerbinetta subtly colours her flirtatiousness with the sort of profundity that lurks in the eyes and voices of pretty girls but vanishes in an “Augenblick”, as she admits – the flash of a spider’s eye.

There are several other crisp performances in the prologue from singers who, like the Composer, are not required in the “opera” itself. Stephen Rooke’s Dancing Master is outstanding – a fine lyric tenor; but Robert Poulton’s shock-haired Music Master, and the just-not-too-overacted Major Domo of Eric Roberts (another disruptive element, as the part is spoken) are also both excellent. As for those who do reappear on Ariadne’s island, the four commedia masks (Owen Webb, Aled Hall, Julian Close and Wynne Evans) make a sprightly team, but as always they outstay their welcome, a problem that not all Armfield’s skilful management of slapstick cliché can solve. Strauss even made the mistake of continuing Zerbinetta’s great show-stopping aria "Grossmächtige Prinzessin"  for some minutes after it’s stopped the show – to my mind a fatal miscalculation. Keith dispatches the whole thing with coquettish brilliance. But one nevertheless tends to sympathise with Ariadne (Orla Boylan), who has had enough long before the end and makes a dignified exit.

Would that she could manage her own music with quite such poise. She is, though, a wooden actress, and her musical phrasing is short-winded; there is bloom – of a silvery kind - on the voice, but rarely on the long musical line. She might take a tip from her three graces, Mary-Jean O’Doherty, Patricia Orr and Joanne Boag, who blend with irresistible sweetness in the march-trio they cheekily base on Harlequin’s “Lieben, Hassen, Hoffen, Zagen”. But Strauss did not make it easy for her, or indeed for her “new god”, Bacchus (Ricardo Tamura), who descends in this production on a superior builder’s cradle and acts, it must be said, like a superior builder. His singing, though, is better than that: sturdy, if one-toned. But the problems of this conclusion are mainly Strauss’s fault. Perhaps we should revert to the work’s earlier ending, which has the masks reappearing and M Jourdain falling asleep in his box.

Finally, I’m happy to report that, after last month’s lamentable Fidelio, Lothar Koenigs and the WNO Orchestra are back on top form. They need to be. Strauss’s chamber textures are exposed and the balance treacherous, but everything here is stylish, athletic and beautiful, in an opera that is almost worth hearing for its orchestration alone.

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OVERLEAF: MORE RICHARD STRAUSS ON THEARTSDESK

Howard Marks was a pothead Errol Flynn, living a life of remarkable escapades and hair's-breadth escapes. A Welsh working-class Oxford graduate in nuclear physics and philosophy, he’d be fascinating company even if he wasn’t once the world’s most successful dope smuggler, and an associate of the IRA, the CIA, the Mob and MI6. His autobiography, Mr Nice, has let Marks earn a living reminiscing about it ever since. But Bernard Rose’s adaptation casts inadvertent doubt on such cult heroism. Marks’s life here seems somehow inconsequential.