The story behind the making of first-time director Mitu Misra’s Lies We Tell is often easier to make sense of than what happens in the film: Misra realised the project with money from his double-glazing business and plenty of bull-headed persistence. Its various disparate elements don’t all co-exist happily, notably a phoned-in cameo from Harvey Keitel as ageing businessman Demi.

Commentators have, over the years, variously described Un ballo in maschera (A Masked Ball) as all things to all people: Verdi’s Tristan und Isolde, Verdi’s masterpiece, Verdi’s Don Giovanni, a pure love poem, and much more. It seems to me to be one of his most consistently exciting works, perfectly proportioned and dramatically astute.

Love, Lies & Records (BBC One) is one of those bathetic titles that are very Yorkshire. See also Last Tango in Halifax, which didn’t do badly. Sleepless in Settle is surely in development. This is the new drama from Kay Mellor, who set Band of Gold in a sorority of sex workers and Fat Friends among people mustering at Weightwatchers.

The first day of rehearsals for The Little Greats was thrilling and terrifying in equal measure: the casts of six shows, the whole chorus, all the creative teams and management milling around and talking nineteen to the dozen in the big, reverberant Linacre Studio at Opera North. Old friends, new colleagues – it was like a mixture of freshers’ week and a first night party. The noise was stupendous.

I’ve seen the future, and it’s semi-staged. The gains here are far more significant than the losses. And where Opera North’s minimalist Leeds Town Hall Ring let Peter Mumford’s video projections fill in the gaps, this new production of Turandot is costumed, lit and directed, lacking only a backdrop. The chorus are squeezed stage right, tightly crammed into the choir seats. The cast gamely do their thing in the narrow space betwixt strings and stage.

For such a macabre, dark work, there’s an awful lot of grinning going on – notably from Opera North’s on-form orchestra, gleefully let off the leash in this most startlingly modern of Puccini operas. Tintinnabulists will swoon at the sight of 13 tuned gongs, and how often do we get to actually see a real cimbasso perched next to the trombones? Conductor Sir Richard Armstrong revels in the opera’s brassier excesses. It’s excessively, joyously loud in places, but I didn’t see anyone complaining.

Listen blind, and it’s hard to believe that this score was written in 1924. Puccini’s stark, declamatory choral writing and outré harmonies sound as fresh as paint, and, until the problematic close, there’s not a wasted note. I’ve rarely heard anything as musically exciting as this production’s first few minutes: a series of savage chords depicting the falling of an executioner’s axe followed by the Mandarin’s angular declamation, sternly dispatched by a nattily-dressed Dean Robinson. All terrific, and then the chorus enter, their combined force powerful enough to dislodge a toupée in the rear stalls.  

Annabel Arden’s staging revels in the physical constraints, the plotting and characterisation much clearer as a result. Alastair Miles’s Timur is a shabby, cowed wretch, his blindness implied with a mere smidgeon of face paint. Sunyoung Seo’s downcast, plainly dressed Liù stands out among the supporting cast, able to reduce her voice to a whisper while losing none of its colour. Rafael Rojas as Calaf is an impetuous, headstrong joy, his high register unchallenged by Puccini's louder tuttis. Set and costume designer Joanna Parker’s sole prop is a giant wobbly throne which begins to teeter precariously. Underneath which we catch a fleeting glimpse of Orla Boylan’s Turandot (pictured right) early on, a terrifying sight in metallic grey and black feathers. Her voice is suitably commanding and steely, only gradually revealing its warmth in the last act. And dressing Gavan Ring, Joseph Shovelton and Nicholas Watts’s Ping, Pang and Pong (below, left) as white faced circus clowns reminds us of their commedia dell'arte roots, the trio making brilliant use of suitcases, surgical instruments and a human skeleton.

Bonaventura Bottone’s Altoun exudes scary authority. Armstrong and Arden ratchet up the tension as the evening progresses, and it’s difficult to suppress a cheer as Calaf solves Turandot’s three riddles. Rojas’s sweet-toned Nessun dorma is utter perfection, aided by immaculate chorus work, and what a surprise it is to hear this iconic aria in context: Puccini‘s refusal to linger a real slap in the face. It’s the final scene which doesn’t quite work. Turandot and Calaf’s love duet, completed after Puccini’s death by Franco Alfano, feels like too easy a resolution and can’t help sounding a bit, er, 19^th century after what’s gone before. Adventurous listeners should seek out Berio’s much more radical 2001 attempt. Until that completion enters the repertoire, Opera North’s production will do, in spades. You can’t imagine Turandot being performed with greater gusto.

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Amy Leach’s energetic Romeo and Juliet is fast, furious and a little breathless, the setting transposed from Verona to a fairly grim contemporary Leeds. Think West Yorkshire Side Story.

Gather round the fire, friends: no Santa down the chimney this Christmas Eve, but the curiously comforting Alan Bennett, with his sardonic and occasionally optimistic diaries. The latest published instalment has the slightly wry title Keeping On Keeping On; Bennett tells us the original title was to be Banging On Banging On.

Baz Luhrmann’s Strictly Ballroom started life as a short stage play in 1984, drawing on its creator’s own experiences in the heady world of amateur ballroom dancing. That the iconic 1992 film exists at all is something of a miracle; production funding was scarce and no distributor was willing to screen it until it was accepted for the 1992 Cannes Festival. Strictly Ballroom is still an intoxicating viewing experience: a visually arresting and upbeat modern fairy tale, smartly cast and superbly performed.

"That cursed mist" may hide the French from the crew of the HMS Indomitable and cause far more deadly damage to moral certainty. But clarity and strength are the assets of Orpha Phelan's new production for Opera North: no gimmicks, superb company work and three principals for the battle of good and evil all equal to their dramatic challenges at a level I haven't seen for decades.

The National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain’s standard of playing is consistently impressive, so much so that it’s easy to forget that the ensemble is effectively reconstituted from scratch each autumn. Last night’s fresh incarnation, deftly conducted by Nicholas Collon, sounded as if they’d been playing together for decades, though without any sense of complacency which that might bring. When you’ve 163 teenagers squeezed onto a stage, the worry is that the details will get lost in a blurry soup of sound. But no; this account of Prokofiev’s Fifth Symphony was immaculate.