This lively interpretation of Richard Strauss’s opera within an opera provides a feast for the senses as a musical highlight of the Edinburgh international Festival.

Feet firmly planted on fertile native soil, but always open to the world, lyric-dramatic soprano Birgit Nilsson soared into realms no-one from the rolling hills and coastline of Sweden’s Bjäre peninsula, where she grew up, could possibly have imagined. The Met, Bayreuth, and all the other great opera houses of the world fell over themselves to acquire stakes in her special incandescence, but she always returned to her home region.

Five weeks have passed since the death of opera director Graham Vick from complications due to Covid-19, shocking even to those of us (un)prepared for the worst, and yet so many of us think about him every day.

This delectable Prom hid behind the title "To Soothe the Aching Heart" the failsafe concept of a programme of the world’s favourite opera extracts, plus some. Take six British opera stars – three sopranos, two tenors and a mezzo – and assign them the business of comforting us all.

It’s hard to know where to start with this chaotic Hansel and Gretel, and not just because Humperdinck’s opera has been cut, spliced and re-stitched with a brand-new libretto, new characters and multi-track, multi-option audio. The restless, competing ideas, the gaudy design, the ill-judged tone, the fussy technology all conspire against the performers, who produce some fine singing despite everything.

The love of power corrupts, the power of love falters or fails.

“Time-travelling” is how Enrique Mazzola, the superb first conductor of Glyndebourne’s last new production of the main season, described the slow-burn trajectory of Verdi’s semi-masterpiece Luisa Miller in his First Person here on theartsdesk.

There are advantages and disadvantages about opera-in-the-round, and it’s a format that suits some operas better than others. Longborough’s Cunning Little Vixen, staged by Olivia Fuchs in their new big-top tent, makes the very most of the advantages and pushes the disadvantages into the shade, without entirely obliterating them. It’s a lively show, very well sung, cleverly, energetically acted and directed; but the problems, of which more below, refuse quite to go away.

It is difficult to know why some operas succeed while others remain unknown. The reasons can be emotional or historical, or it might be as simple as a poor cast who couldn’t quite launch the opera into the stars. In the case of Luisa Miller, we have the perfect example of a masterpiece which has been a little bit neglected. As an Italian and a bel canto lover, I have no answer for why it is not more widely known and loved.

Now that the summer opera-house companies have pulled off staged triumphs under the most difficult of circumstances, it’s time to celebrate semi-al-fresco concerts. Not so many have cropped up as I’d hoped after the success of the Battersea Park Bandstand Chamber Music series last year. The Wigmore Hall made a start in nearby Portman Square and we have a host of impressive August events planned by Bold Tendencies in Peckham Multi-Storey Car Park, building on the successes of 2020.