Lehár’s Merry Widow has been been spreading enchantment across the globe for well over a century. She’s the vintage champagne of operettas, and the prospect of John Wilson popping her cork was more than a little enticing. Wilson, one feels, instinctively knows how this music goes and indeed did so before even the composer put the notes on the page. He was surely born into the wrong century. So why do I feel a "but" coming on? Why did this particular magnum of bubbly not go to my head?

Dissatisfied housewives who eventually stand by their men joined jewelled hands in a divine evening of operatic decadence. Suppressed Bianca all but steps over the body of her strangled lover to get at the muscles of her killer husband in Zemlinsky’s A Florentine Tragedy, taking its cue from the deep purple imagery of Oscar Wilde’s story. And in Richard Strauss’s Die Frau ohne Schatten (The Woman without a Shadow), the Dyer’s Wife readily gives up her dreams of sacrificing motherhood and taking up with a fantasy toyboy when domestic violence looms.

The Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra can play Haydn’s last symphony - No 104 “London” - in its sleep but that is not, I hasten to add, the impression one wants to take away from any performance of it and especially not in the city that inspired it. The music tells us that Haydn had a rather better time in our capital than Bernard Haitink would have us believe but this rather dogged account on the penultimate night of the Prom season seemed to suppress the work’s genial good humour and pre-empt most of its surprises with a one-size-fits-all approach.

What a joy this once-in-a-generation season is. From Moscow comes this free-wheeling production of Shakespeare's great morality play, and one that also makes remarkably free with the text too. Even those familiar with Measure For Measure will be thankful for the surtitles, particularly in the second act when director Yury Butusov dispenses with whole scenes, including the denouement.

 It’s not so very rare for actors to be given a shot at directing their own film. It happens slightly less often that they find financial backing to work on their own script. What makes Breathing, which opened this week in the UK, such a collector’s item is that it is so very accomplished.

De Falla: Nights in the Gardens of Spain, The Three-Cornered Hat, Homenajes Jean-Efflaum Bavouzet (piano), Raquel Lojendio (soprano), BBC Philharmonic/Juanjo Mena (Chandos)

As in sex, so it is in music: there’s a lot riding on the climax. The celebrated third act trio of Der Rosenkavalier is arguably the most famous orgasm in music – dear reader, can you name a better one? – but time it wrongly and you’ll regret it. There is, however, absolutely nothing regrettable about this A-list cast in the hands of director David McVicar and conductor Edward Gardner. Theirs is the most assured, most riveting Rosenkavalier in this country for years.

Highly finished literary tales of doomed nixies, like Hans Christian Andersen's The Little Mermaid, seem to have prompted reams of bad art but plenty of mellifluous music. Not even all of that is on the same level. Viennese late-Romantic Zemlinsky's loose-limbed three-part Andersen homage has long floated in a limbo somewhere below the more curvaceous forms of Dvořák's Rusalka and Sibelius's The Oceanides, and not just because of unfavourable historical circumstances (the composer withdrew the work after its 1905 premiere, and it did not resurface until 1984).

Having blazed a trail through choral music, Simon Russell Beale now focuses his attentions on the symphony in this new four-part series. At last able to put aside the mind-games and chicanery of his role as Home Secretary William Towers in Spooks (RIP), Beale emerged as an engaging and enthusiastic host in this opening episode. He wore his erudition with an ironic twinkle as he toured the garrets and palaces of Europe on the trail of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven.

The spectacle of an orchestra named after Mahler playing Stravinsky irresistibly calls to mind Stravinsky’s report of a performance of the Eighth Symphony in Zurich in 1913. “Imagine”, he wrote to Maurice Delage, “that for two hours you are made to understand that two times two makes four.” Oddly enough, repetition is the lifeblood of Stravinsky’s own music, though he rarely makes two times two equal four, and his symphonies don’t last two hours (nor, incidentally, do Mahler’s).