Say what you like about America, but it certainly knows how to turn out an opera diva. While the Russians and even Italians can be chilly and untouchable in their splendour, there’s a cultivated ease with the likes of Renée Fleming and Joyce DiDonato that allows a song recital to be both a relaxed conversation with an old friend and a piece of highly crafted technical showmanship. It’s artifice and artistry of the highest order – not just making it all look easy, but showing us just enough mechanics to prove that it definitely isn’t.

What is truth? Is it fixed or fluid, personal or universal? Does it require hard evidence or merely faith? These are the areas of interest poked and prodded in this co-production between the Traverse and Peepolykus, the company which previously brought The Hound of the Baskervilles to the stage. The result is an eccentric romp through the life of Arthur Conan Doyle, a famously ridiculed figurehead for the spirit world in his later years, which ponders – none too deeply, but with immense good humour – the conflict between fideism and rationalism.

Her Majesty was making a rare concert-hall appearance to present the Queen’s Medal for Music, and any little Englanders in the audience might have been tempted to link royalty to Elgar’s Enigma Variations. But conductor Robin Ticciati, with a generosity and wisdom beyond his 29 years, raised this orchestral masterpiece to the universal level it deserves. Elgar’s "friends pictured within" trod air and revealed every aspect of their often shy, beautiful souls.

One has low expectations of Great Expectations. As the Dickens bicentenary draws to a close with yet another version, young Pip must once again come to the aid of the convict Magwitch, once again be raised up from apprentice blacksmith to gentleman, once again fall for the cold, unrequiting Estella Havisham. And once again make do without the first-person narrative that gives him his character. 

You don't see much of Arthur Wing Pinero's considerable output these days. Although he was largely contemporaneous with Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw and Gilbert and Sullivan, whose works have stayed the course, his plays have not, with just a few exceptions. But in that weird way these things sometimes happen, it seems Pinero is undergoing something of a resurgence (in London at least), as a production of The Second Mrs Tanqueray has just finished at the Rose Theatre in Kingston and the Donmar Warehouse is to stage Trelawny of the Wells early next year.

It’s something of a fashion at the moment for countertenors to break out of the baroque, to have a bit of a fling with classical and even romantic repertoire. David Daniels has experimented with Berlioz, Philippe Jaroussky has flirted as only a Frenchman can with the mélodies of Massenet and Hahn, and now Andreas Scholl is embracing his native lieder.

You can tell a lot about a performance of L’elisir d’amore from the two pizzicato string chords that so neatly take the sheen off the military pomp of the opening phrase. Played well, these subversive little asides can throb with all the wit and cheeky self-mockery that elevates this opera above the hundreds of Donizetti also-rans. Played earnestly, as they were last night however, they heralded a rather limp performance – laboriously correct without ever finding (let alone seizing) that anarchic glee that riots through the score.

The BBC has other things on its to-do list at the minute. However, once all the newly installed acting heads have been replaced by actual heads, and the matter of the ex-DG’s severance pay sufficiently chewed over by the Corporation’s bosom pals in the Fourth Estate and the Conservative Party, perhaps someone at TV Centre could get around to other business. The search, for example, for a costume drama capable of giving Downton Abbey a bloody nose.

It's sad, isn't it, that we still live in a world where the more something sounds like a great party, the less “serious” it is considered? Think about how much deep meaning is attached by how many to, say, the portentous mitherings of Thom Yorke, then try to imagine that degree of beard-rubbing analysis being given over to this non-stop blast of joyous grooves that have rocked festival stages, dance clubs and hip hop shows over the summer. Not gonna happen, is it?

The famous count could not have a more theatrical pedigree if he tried. The great actor-manager Henry Irving – tall, preternaturally thin, with a fixed glare (due, apparently, to extreme myopia) and a grand manner which gave way, said Bernard Shaw, to "glimpses of a latent bestial dangerousness" – was, said everyone at the time, the obvious source of the Transylvanian Undead aristo as he was created on the page in Dracula by Irving’s business-manager Bram Stoker.