Even more perhaps than straight theatre, opera seems to draw attention to the meaning behind what may on the face of it appear a simple story. That doesn’t necessarily mean that the story, with all its realistic impedimenta, can be simply ignored or reconfigured, as has alas too often been the case.

The Buxton International Festival this year was lavish in its smaller-scale productions in addition to Ambroise Thomas’s Hamlet, the heavyweight offer of the opera programme. And outstanding among them was the combination of Bernstein’s Trouble in Tahiti and Poulenc’s La Voix Humaine: seen by director Daisy Evans not just as a double bill with an overlapping need for telephones on set, but as two sides of the same story.

At first sight, it seemed that Clonter Opera’s decision to tackle Tosca this year might be a leap too far. Its once-a-year complete production, dedicated to nurturing emerging talent in the security of the Cheshire countryside, must always be an essay in miniaturization, and a singing cast of six and an orchestra of 12 might seem hopelessly small for Puccini’s grand passions and shuddering shocks.

Ambroise Thomas’s version of Hamlet is the flagship production of this year’s Buxton International Festival and was always going to be a considerable challenge. How to re-imagine what is admittedly a very 19^th century, very French Romantic re-imagining of Shakespeare for the intimate setting of Buxton Opera House and the necessarily limited resources of a summer festival?

From the animatronic cat on the bar of the Garter Inn to the rowers’ crew who haul their craft across the stage and the military ranks of “Dig for Victory” cabbages arrayed in Ford’s garden, all the period flourishes that helped make Richard Jones’s Falstaff such an audience hit twice before at Glyndebourne look as spruce and smart as ever in this revival.

A Salome without the head of John the Baptist is nothing new: several directors have perversely decided they could do without in recent productions. In concert, the illusion needs the charismatic force of a great soprano and conductor. We got that at the Proms 11 years ago with Nina Stemme and Donald Runnicles. Now Asmik Grigorian, even more the ideal as the obsessive teenage princess, crowns the end of a season that has been a total triumph for Pappano and his London Symphony Orchestra.

Poor, slightly silly Semele fries at the sight of lover Jupiter casting off his mortal form, but in Congreve’s and Handel’s supposedly happy ending, everyone else rejoices that Bacchus is the offspring of this dalliance. Or do they? Not in the new production by Royal Opera supremo Oliver Mears, who’s always favoured the dark side. As in trendy dramas like TV’s Kaos, the gods are the callous rich, mortals their plaything servants.

Over 100 years ago, John Christie envisaged Wagner’s Parsifal with limited forces in the Organ Room at Glyndebourne. He would have been amazed to see it arrive on the main stage this year. But émigrés Carl Ebert and Fritz Busch persuaded him that Mozart was the real country-house ideal. Le nozze di Figaro remains Glyndebourne’s perfect opera, and Mariame Clément’s new production, launched last night with the 588th performance here, keeps it real.

Sometimes, as the first act of Beethoven’s Fidelio closes, the chorus of prisoners discreetly fade away backstage as their brief taste of liberty ends. At Garsington Opera, in Jamie Manton’s revival of a production by John Cox, they slowly descended, one by one, through a circular trap at the front of the stage. We see and hear freedom’s loss, person by person, step by agonising step.

Opera can take many forms and fulfil many purposes: this chamber opera by Zakiya Leeming and Sam Redway is about vaccination. Based on history, it has a story to tell and lessons to teach.