Of course she isn't now the watchful, learning 29-year-old who premiered Covent Garden’s opulent, sensually loaded production in 1995, but Gheorghiu’s varicoloured voice - a rainbow of tears, sobs, scoops, warbling runs and top notes that seem to rack her body with pain - has if anything added more colours since then (including a less fetching jeune-fille timbre in the middle that sounds as if it’s hiding a problem).

Yes, it's still him all right. Hovering around a disputed seventysomething and bouncing back from a serious operation, Plácido Domingo puts into seemingly smooth gear that beaten-bronze voice in a million and still sounds like the tenor we've known and loved for decades. Which might be a problem in a classic Verdi baritone role, beleaguered Doge of Genoa Simon Boccanegra, were grizzled authority not the keynote. That works, but if only Domingo's towering stage presence had been better harnessed in the umpteenth revival of what was never a very human production by Elijah Moshinsky. This is a singular opera which can seem slow to kindle and then a bit stagey if no truth is to be found in its many confrontations. And sadly there was very little of that last night.

Watching and hearing this revival of WNO’s now eight-year-old production of Verdi’s Rigoletto, it’s hard to remember he composed it only a year or two before La Traviata, that most psychologically believable of all his operas. In Rigoletto nothing makes sense: the hunchback’s pretty daughter, her apparently willing incarceration, Rigoletto’s hoodwinking (literally) into helping her abduction, her final self-sacrifice – all palpable nonsense. Yet the piece never seriously fails.

Shakespeare's Macbeth is full of fleetingly funny moments. Halfway through the regicidal Second Act, we stumble upon a castle porter gibbering on about the bodily consequences of drink - "nose-painting, sleep and urine". Verdi's opera mostly shuns these vignettes for the bigger, more concentratedly darker picture. The music works itself up into an ornamented mania and for the most part broods on low orchestral colourings. There is nothing funny about a single second of it.

Europe is alive with the sound of music of all kinds through the summer, and here theartsdesk brings you listings of this year's attractions, many of which you can still get tickets for and combine culture with splendid cities and landscapes. From avant-garde dance music at Barcelona's Sonar to deepest Wagner in Bayreuth, this is the unmissable clickable guide to a cultivated European trip.

Europe is alive with the sound of music of all kinds through the summer, and here theartsdesk brings you listings of this year's attractions, many of which you can still get tickets for and combine culture with splendid cities and landscapes. From avant-garde dance music at Barcelona's Sonar to deepest Wagner in Bayreuth, this is the unmissable clickable guide to a cultivated European trip.

Golfing for Cats: Alan Coren once invented the perfect book title on the basis that if you combined those who follow the activities of Tiger Woods with those who adore smaller domestic felines, you have a massive demographic primed to buy your last tome. Likewise for TV commissioning editors, there must be something tempting about the high-concept hybrid.

Having trailblazed in the Choral category at the 2010 BBC Music Magazine Awards, Antonio Pappano's EMI recording of the Verdi's Requiem with stylish Italian forces and a top-notch quartet of soloists has just been awarded the Critics' Prize at the tawdry but compelling mix of the sublime and the ridiculous that is the Classical Brits.

And well deserved it is, too. When did you last hear a Verdi Requiem with a truly operatic, 80-strong Italian chorus? That makes all the difference. And the fact that the finest Verdian soprano of our day, Anja Harteros, crowns it all with a "'Libera me" of blistering intensity sets the seal. Pappano's comment was telling: "Recording the Verdi Requiem was a labour of love, and fear!... This is a great honour for both the Orchestra and Chorus of the Accademia di Santa Cecilia. It comes at a very critical moment when Santa Cecilia is faced with proposed drastic cuts to its funding from the government in Italy."

The tireless and endlessly curious Pappano has been doing well all round with his Rome team. Their delicately-coloured recording of Puccini's Madama Butterfly, another top recommendation in a crowded field, claims another Classical Brit award: "Best Female Artist of the Year" goes to Angela Gheorghiu for her luminous Cio-Cio San. How well I remember Gheorghiu at a previous Classical Brits evening following Russell Watson on to the platform and talking, with a no doubt purposeful slip of her English, about "performers who try hardly to sing this music". Well, she may be a bit of a diva, but she deserves to be.

• Find Verdi's Requiem conducted by Antonio Pappano and the Ochestra and Chorus of the Accademia di Santa Cecilia on Amazon

David McVicar's new Aida production had an opening mise en scène of such unashamed ugliness, a revolving main feature (a wall of scaffolding) of such audacious featurelessness, a wardrobe of such brazen tastelessness (think Dungeons and Dragons), that my critical faculties sort of went into a coma.

Glyndebourne Opera's headline news this summer is its first-ever production of Britten's Billy Budd, to be directed by Donmar Warehouse director Michael Grandage in his own first venture into opera. A new Don Giovanni with Gerald Finley and a revival of the historic 1975 David Hockney Rake's Progress accompany listings of previous Festival productions of Macbeth, Cosi fan tutte and Hänsel und Gretel.