In the Sun King's domain, dazzling noon succcumbed to a monstrous snowstorm at twilight. Within the chandeliered splendour of his successor Louis XV's Opéra Royal, a similar drama was about to be enacted: heroic Bellerophon, caught in time-honoured operatic fashion in a struggle between two love rivals, would have to face the chimera on the road to glory. Since this was the by-and-large cosy Lully rather than radical Rameau, I wasn't expecting to feel any pity and terror. Yet pity and sympathy there certainly were thanks to Lully's finest inventions in the hands of Christophe Rousset's Les Talens Lyriques and a superlative Belgian chamber choir.

In the Sun King's domain, dazzling noon succcumbed to a monstrous snowstorm at twilight. Within the chandeliered splendour of his successor Louis XV's Opéra Royal, a similar drama was about to be enacted: heroic Bellerophon, caught in time-honoured operatic fashion in a struggle between two love rivals, would have to face the chimera on the road to glory. Since this was the by-and-large cosy Lully rather than radical Rameau, I wasn't expecting to feel any pity and terror. Yet pity and sympathy there certainly were thanks to Lully's finest inventions in the hands of Christophe Rousset's Les Talens Lyriques and a superlative Belgian chamber choir.

Cecilia Bartoli invites you to her party, she stands on stage beaming and welcoming you as her guest, about to serve up a banquet of song. This is what last night’s concert felt like in the glowing warmth of this remarkable Italian mezzo-soprano’s company, singing one of her favourite composers, Handel, ranging from the sunlit laughter that seems embedded in her voice to some of the most tragically moving singing I’ve heard.

Places, please, deliciousness, please. This is Delibes, a man whose music goes with delectable disbelief, and this is that zany thing, a Fifties nymph ballet, so let us sip hallucinogenic Arcadian cocktails and leave normality at the cloakroom. But the sheer prettiness of Léo Delibes's ballets (La Source, Coppélia, Sylvia) is too much for most dancemakers to digest. Even a choreographer so oozing charm as Frederick Ashton made no classic with his 1952 staging of Sylvia. Last night, given the bumbling performance by the Royal Ballet after a few years’ absence, it came over even more as a ballet best to have on iPod.

Iphigenia is an abandoned child, almost murdered by her father, lost in bewilderment, captured and indoctrinated in an artificial existence. It hardly matters that her father was the legendary Greek hero Agamemnon, her mother the notorious Clytemnestra.

Ariadne auf Naxos, according to its librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal, is all about fidelity: fidelity in love, fidelity in art, fidelity in spirit. Ariadne on her island, abandoned by Theseus, can give herself to Bacchus only by persuading herself that he’s a god. The actress Zerbinetta gives herself to every man in sight, including the Composer (played, incidentally, by a girl), who for a moment weakens in his lofty contempt for these comic actors who intrude on his high ideals with their vulgar songs and dubious humour.

Hofmannsthal could seldom be parted from his deep meanings. All the same the real interest of Strauss’s chamber opera – composed just after Der Rosenkavalier – lies in its theatrical method, which, pre-Pirandello, pre-Turandot, presents an earnest, heroic drama disrupted by irrelevant characters who offer advice to the heroine and do their best to turn the opera seria into street theatre. It’s an entertaining, suggestive idea, but problematic in performance, partly because Strauss couldn’t bring himself to abandon his epic conclusion, which tends to drag on and in the process rather spoils the irony. The finest music comes in the Prologue, backstage before the show, which has the performers popping in and out of their dressing rooms in the best Feydeau manner while the high-minded young Composer laments the looming wreckage of his magnum opus.

This is also much the most enjoyable part of Neil Armfield’s production in this WNO revival at the Wales Millennium Centre in Cardiff. True, he drops Hofmannstal’s beloved 18th century, and with it the whole idea of the grand Viennese palais (which survives nevertheless in the text). Still, Dale Ferguson’s modern theatre-backstage fizzes and crackles with comic vitality while allowing space for those moments where the music speaks, the comedy retreats, Zerbinetta looks into the Composer’s eyes and for about 30 seconds falls in love. Sarah Connolly, in the travesty role of the Composer, is wonderfully touching in these episodes, and Gillian Keith (pictured right with a suited Connolly) as Zerbinetta subtly colours her flirtatiousness with the sort of profundity that lurks in the eyes and voices of pretty girls but vanishes in an “Augenblick”, as she admits – the flash of a spider’s eye.

There are several other crisp performances in the prologue from singers who, like the Composer, are not required in the “opera” itself. Stephen Rooke’s Dancing Master is outstanding – a fine lyric tenor; but Robert Poulton’s shock-haired Music Master, and the just-not-too-overacted Major Domo of Eric Roberts (another disruptive element, as the part is spoken) are also both excellent. As for those who do reappear on Ariadne’s island, the four commedia masks (Owen Webb, Aled Hall, Julian Close and Wynne Evans) make a sprightly team, but as always they outstay their welcome, a problem that not all Armfield’s skilful management of slapstick cliché can solve. Strauss even made the mistake of continuing Zerbinetta’s great show-stopping aria "Grossmächtige Prinzessin"  for some minutes after it’s stopped the show – to my mind a fatal miscalculation. Keith dispatches the whole thing with coquettish brilliance. But one nevertheless tends to sympathise with Ariadne (Orla Boylan), who has had enough long before the end and makes a dignified exit.

Would that she could manage her own music with quite such poise. She is, though, a wooden actress, and her musical phrasing is short-winded; there is bloom – of a silvery kind - on the voice, but rarely on the long musical line. She might take a tip from her three graces, Mary-Jean O’Doherty, Patricia Orr and Joanne Boag, who blend with irresistible sweetness in the march-trio they cheekily base on Harlequin’s “Lieben, Hassen, Hoffen, Zagen”. But Strauss did not make it easy for her, or indeed for her “new god”, Bacchus (Ricardo Tamura), who descends in this production on a superior builder’s cradle and acts, it must be said, like a superior builder. His singing, though, is better than that: sturdy, if one-toned. But the problems of this conclusion are mainly Strauss’s fault. Perhaps we should revert to the work’s earlier ending, which has the masks reappearing and M Jourdain falling asleep in his box.

Finally, I’m happy to report that, after last month’s lamentable Fidelio, Lothar Koenigs and the WNO Orchestra are back on top form. They need to be. Strauss’s chamber textures are exposed and the balance treacherous, but everything here is stylish, athletic and beautiful, in an opera that is almost worth hearing for its orchestration alone.

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OVERLEAF: MORE RICHARD STRAUSS ON THEARTSDESK

One after the other they came. Stunning aria after stunning aria. Affecting in their harmonies, infectious in their rhythms, arresting in their textures, vivid in their melodies. The Royal Opera had taken a mighty gamble with Agostino Steffani's 300-year-old Niobe, Regina di Tebe, a forgotten opera by a forgotten composer. But they were completely right to do so. For Niobe is a masterpiece. And last night's performance was a triumph.

Bo Burnham says he doesn’t like the terms musical comic, internet sensation or teenage wonder. Well he’s all three, save the last now, as he turned 20 during this year’s Fringe - and anyway he prefers the term prodigy, he tells us in deadpan tones typical of the deeply ironic, faux offensive manner of his performance style. But sensationally talented he undoubtedly is, and this is an hour so stuffed with gags - verbal, visual and musical - that one almost doesn’t have enough time to savour each one before yet another rolls by.