The power of music solves every problem, at least when as bewitchingly performed as it was here. With the great mezzo Christine Rice voiceless for at least a night, and rising star Caitlin Hulcup singing for her from the midst of the instruments in the pit right at the centre of the Roundhouse, how could faithful Penelope's final acceptance of her long-lost husband Ulysses (Roderick Williams) achieve transcendence?

Remastered they may be, but the 20 live operas recorded here between 1949 and 1964 vary soundwise from clean at best to atrocious, with all the caprices of stage noise and audience participation seemingly acceptable at the time (so often there's the shouting prompter who seems duty bound to cue everything – even interjecting a loud libiamo! in the silence before the voices kick in for La traviata's Brindisi).

The eel is dying. Its body flits through a series of complicated knots which become increasingly grotesque torques. Immersed in a pool of brine — concentrated salt water five times denser than seawater — it is succumbing to toxic shock. As biomatter on the sea floor of the Gulf of Mexico decomposes, brine and methane are produced, and where these saline pockets collect, nothing grows. Dead creatures drop into it; live creatures that linger in it die.

At first glance, the meetings between heart surgeon Steven Murphy (Colin Farrell) and a 16-year-old boy, Martin (Barry Keoghan), lead one to fear the worst for the kid. Their stilted exchanges in public places, during which the man gives the teen expensive gifts, don’t suggest a family connection, or a mentor-student relationship, but a secret intimacy that can only be, in some way, dreadfully wrong.

This last of Sir John Eliot Gardiner’s semi-staged Monteverdi series took us back practically to the very start of the whole genre. L’Orfeo was presented in Mantua in 1607 as a court opera, and will have been seen and heard by a fraction of the number of people who crowded into Bristol’s Colston Hall on Sunday night.

“Never give one concert if you can give a hundred” might stand as a motto for the conductor who once hauled his choir and orchestra round the world performing all 200 or so of Bach’s cantatas. And mathematically Sir John Eliot Gardiner’s latest project is a nearly exact honouring of that idea.

Human sacrifice and long-term reconciliation are serious matters for music-drama. Not that you'd know it from Handel's pasticcio or confectionary of previous operatic hits, nor from Gerard Jones's one-note production. For strip-cartoon violence Tarantino-style you need panache, and there’s little of that here. Interesting, too, that Handel gets hardly a look-in throughout the interview Jones the Younger gives in the programme. More important, does he serve the fledgling dramatic abilities of fellow trainees on the Royal Opera's Jette Parker Young Artists Programme?

Right now we’re at the heart of the silly season. In mid-August no-one releases albums (it’s the same in January). Here at Disc of the Day we’re screaming for something decent to review. But, no, microscopic bands choose to hold their albums back and go head to head with the big names during the pre-Christmas release splurge of September and October. The fact is, as autumn arrives, no-one will cover Blobus & His Black Metal Armada over Britney, Bastille, Ed Sheeran, Haim, Frank Ocean, and the rest.

The opening shot of Chevalier trains the camera on a rocky beach surmounted by overcast skies. A dark form emerges from the water, then another and another. They're like creatures from the primordial soup making land all those millions of years ago, but actually they're scuba divers who happily pose with their catches before clubbing them to death. They return to the floating palace on which they are holidaying off the Greek coast, and strip off one another's rubber pelts to expose the tender white middle-aged flesh beneath. 

In a gallery darkened to evoke the seabed that was its resting place for over a thousand years, the colossal figure of Hapy, the Egyptian god of the Nile flood, greets visitors just as it met sailors entering the busy trading port of Thonis-Heracleion some 2,000 years ago. One of the largest objects ever loaned to the British Museum, Hapy symbolises the prosperity bestowed upon Egypt by the river Nile, but whose waters ultimately brought about the destruction of the ancient cities of Canopus and Thonis-Heracleion, which subsided into the sea in the 8th century AD.