I find that my experience of living as a Black man in the UK cannot help but inform the way I approach my work and never more so than with Verdi’s Rigoletto. It was because Verdi’s and his librettist Piave’s exploration of the impact of difference resonated with me so strongly that I was encouraged to take on this directing role for Opera North.

One of the galvanizing wonders of the operatic world happened when David McVicar’s production of Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro was new, back in 2006: the sight and sound of Royal Opera music director Antonio Pappano in seamless dual role as conductor and recitative fortepianist.

January to mid-May 2021 were the bleakest Covid months, yielding only the occasional livestream at least half as good as being there (Barrie Kosky’s magically reinvented Strauss Der Rosenkavalier from Munich, a film of Britten's The Turn of the Screw around Wilton’s Music Hall more imaginative than the actual production). The burden then fell, in England at least, on the country opera houses.

Two major composers took Pushkin’s narrative poem The Gypsies as the subject for two very different operas. The 19 year old Rachmaninov in 1892 had inspiration but not much sense of dramatic continuity; Leoncavallo in 1912, 20 years on from his deserved smash hit Pagliacci, managed the flow but not the inspiration. Give me Rachmaninov’s memorability any day, but at least Leoncavallo’s hokum had the benefit of the best singers and conducting at Cadogan Hall last night.

That the ever-decreasing circles of Richard Jones’s first Wagner Ring instalment for English National Opera ended in a no-show for the fire that should have made former Valkyrie supreme Brünnhilde proof against all but a fearless hero – Westminster City Council poured cold water on it before this first night – is in a way the least of it.

"Nature is healing," declared the social media meme, back in the early days of lockdown when humanity had temporarily retreated to focus on its banana bread. There were pictures to prove it, apparently. Dolphins sported in the canals of Venice; city gardens filled with newly emboldened songbirds. Didn’t a herd of goats colonise Llandudno at one point? Something like that, anyway.

Phyllida Lloyd’s production of Macbeth has been in rep at the Royal Opera since 2002, and it is a solid performer. The setting is slick and vaguely period, with lots of iron weaponry, smart, pony-tailed warriors, but not a kilt in sight. The set (designer Anthony Ward) is a foreshortened metallic box, from which the back often rises to reveal a stormy sky (for the witches) or to introduce large scale props.

A Samoan-themed Ring cycle? Well, why not? A calculated distance has always separated its audience from the Norse and German epics of its origin.

Is Bizet’s Carmen all about Carmen? Or Don José and his obsession with her? Or the society that made her what she is? Or all of the above? Inevitably it’s an opera that almost never escapes some Regietheater treatment these days. Director Edward Dick’s take on it is definitely one of those, and tries to tackle as many of the issues as it can.