Covent Garden’s masked balls circling around the New Year feature not the seasonal bourgeois Viennese couple and a bat-winged conspirator but a king, his best friend’s wife and – excessively so in this production – the grim reaper. Big voices are what’s needed if it’s Verdi rather than Johann Strauss II, and if we can’t have Jonas Kaufmann, who’s committed his energies to a lesser protagonist, Giordano’s Andrea Chénier, this coming January, then much-trumpeted Maltese tenor Joseph Calleja will have to do.

Eternal love is in the air, not seasonal fluff, at the Royal Opera this December. Later in the month Verdi’s most ecstatic duet, in Un ballo in maschera, will find his Riccardo and Amelia briefly playing Tristan and Isolde, very much in the shadow of not so much the greatest as the strangest love story ever told.

Not so much a national hero, more a national disgrace. That seems to be the current consensus on Peer Gynt as Norway moves forward from having canonized the wild-card wanderer of Ibsen's early epic. It’s now 200 years since Norway gained a constitution, and 114 since Peer first shone in the country's National Theatre, that elegant emblem of the Norwegian language. Where does this uniquely prosperous country stand today, spiritually speaking, and can Ibsen’s myth, creating as potent a figure as Oedipus, Hamlet, Don Juan or Faust, offer any answers?

If Brahms’s First Symphony has long been dubbed “Beethoven’s Tenth”, then the 23-year-old Rachmaninov’s First merits the label of “Tchaikovsky’s Seventh” (a genuine candidate for that title, incidentally, turns out to be a poor reconstruction from Tchaikovsky’s sketches by one Bogatryryev).

Even the most reluctant of completists should find the prospect of the Beethoven works for cello and piano undaunting. In their totality, these pieces consist of just five sonatas and three sets of variations, which fit neatly on to just two CDs, or occupy two recital programmes. The works are also very important in the early development of the solo cello repertoire. Beethoven biographer Jan Swafford describes the “confident, ebullient, fresh and youthful” sonatas of Op 5 as a genre which the composer, at the time, had “virtually to himself".

Baudelaire called him a “pictorial Balzac” and said he was the most important man “in the whole of modern art”, while Degas was only a little less effusive, claiming him as one of the three greatest draughtsman of the 19^th century, alongside Ingres and Delacroix.

Most pianists never truly master one of Brahms’s two piano concertos, those colossal symphonies for soloist and orchestra, let alone both. To present the two in one concert, then, seems foolhardy – and apparently was when András Schiff went for the marathon at the Edinburgh Festival during the Brian McMaster era. No-one expected anything but true majesty, though, when Elisabeth Leonskaja asked to do the same. The Scottish Chamber Orchestra duly obliged, taking up her suggestion of Okko Kamu, a Finnish master I haven’t seen for decades, as conductor.

Walking into this exhibition is a bit like walking into a great forest. The dark green walls are hung all around with paintings of trees; we look up through branches that spiral dizzyingly skyward, while the upwards sweep of vast trunks seem relentlessly, tangibly full of life. Some of these paintings verge on abstraction, the forms of tree trunks simplified and reduced to an arrangement of planes, with spatial recession represented entirely through colour.

One queen is much like another in so-called “historical” Italian early to mid 19th-century opera. Elizabeth of England, Christina of Sweden, take your pick, they all fall for a tenor courtier who loves Another (the seconda donna, soprano or mezzo). With Donizetti, the musical drama is almost as disposable as the plot until a stonking number or two rolls up. Jacopo Foroni, more or less unknown until Wexford resurrected him a year ago, has a few more felicitous orchestral touches but nothing as memorable as Donizetti's best.

Dvořák’s rustic operetta sits, swinging its legs rather diffidently, historically somewhere between the neverland Bohemia of Smetana’s The Bartered Bride and the lacerating reality of village life in Janáček'’s Jenůfa. The Cunning Peasant’s charms lie in its string of sophisticated songs and dances, more through-composed than Smetana’s, and in the abundance of not over-taxing roles, as well as chorus numbers, it offers to students.