After conducting two performances of Parsifal since Saturday and one of Mahler’s Eighth Symphony, most human beings would be spending a day curled up at home. But Valery Gergiev doesn’t know what carpet slippers look like. Besides, he’s currently on tour in Britain with his Mariinsky Opera forces, and he’s conducting nothing but blockbusters. Last night, Verdi’s Requiem in London. On Good Friday, it’s the epic Parsifal again, in Birmingham. The tour finished, he’ll be back in St Petersburg by Sunday, launching the Mariinsky’s third International Piano Festival. 

David McVicar’s Rigoletto hurls full-frontal nudity and an orgy at the audience within its opening minutes – dramatic grenades to clear the well-worn ground ahead. Back in 2001 this may have been enough to shock-and-awe, but a decade and a couple of revivals on and it takes rather more. And more we certainly get in the current revival. Not only does Italian superstar tenor Vittorio Grigolo take his turn in the Duke’s tight britches, but John Eliot Gardiner takes charge in the pit for this, his first Rigoletto.

Famously, at its Venice premiere in 1853, La traviata had trouble with the censor, not only over the salty innuendos of the plot, but over the simple fact that it was set in the present day and in contemporary costume. A rule like that would finish off most updated modern stagings (and no bad thing at that). But David McVicar’s now two-year-old staging of Verdi’s early verismo masterpiece in Cardiff's Wales Millennium Centre wouldn’t be one of them.

Next week Sir John Tomlinson (b 1946), renowned mega-bass and routine frequenter of the Covent Garden stage, appears in concert at the Windsor Festival. It is a picturesque halt on a career that sees him circling the world's greatest opera houses in the most epic roles in opera. As is typical of this far from typical singer, the concert is huge in its range, encompassing Mozart, Verdi and Wagner, its lyrical portrayals ranging from servants to gods, from priests to cobblers, human conditions of every shade from ruthless to kind.

The Swiss-born Sicilian tenor has died, far too young at the age of 43, 10 days after an accident on his Vespa. He was one of the best and most stylish of his rare breed, even if the scrummage to find an heir to Pavarotti sometimes pushed him into a corner. I'll not forget his Alvaro in Verdi's La forza del Destino at Covent Garden: here after so long was another true Italian tenor with a golden middle range who could at least act with his voice.

You can't say this about many works but Verdi's Requiem really is as snug as a bug in a rug in the Royal Albert Hall. In which other space could the three moon-like bass drums orbiting the back of the orchestra not look ridiculous? Last night's performance seemed to have all the hallmarks of a classic. Great cast. Three of Britain's great amateur choirs. One of the most talented conductors of his generation. All Bychkov needed to do was mix and stir. Right?

Only three years ago, Hofesh Shechter, the Israeli-born, London-based choreographer, made the leap into the big leagues, almost overnight, with his Uprising/In Your Rooms double bill. The following year he produced a "Choreographer’s Cut", a bulked-up version in the Roundhouse, part dance, part gig. 2010’s Political Mother was received with rapture, so what next?

Acid prophecies of this show’s swift demise, as with that of the great Italian tenor whose supposed transformation from il stupendo to il stifferino results in the debut of a surpise new Otello at the "Cleveland Grand Opera", turn out to be greatly exaggerated. Allora, the tunes and the lyrics aren’t prime cut, but it’s slickly done, strongly cast and contains enough frothy set pieces to earn its salt. And any musical which has stylish fun with both the most electrifying opening of any opera (Verdi's, of course) and the noblest curtain deserves to run and run, in my book at least.

Time lurches when you see a historical play. But is it a case of autre temps, autres moeurs, or of plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose? Either way, the history needs to slap your face hard with recognition. Schiller’s Luise Miller is a 1784 play that clearly fires at its own vicious contemporary world, a catastrophically corrupt and unruly coalition of German states, and is its world just too far from our own to believe in the tragic young lovers at its core?

Public feuding, private sorrows: the elemental passions of Verdi's Ligurian power struggle haven't had a vivid London staging since the Alden-Fielding ENO classic gave it a guiding (or, according to taste, hindering) giant hand in the late 1980s. Dmitri Tcherniakov, the most disciplined opera director to have come out of Russia, was a clever choice for the company to invite to the Coliseum.