Most singers give recitals, and very nice they are too. But there are some – Bartoli, Florez, Netrebko, Terfel – who really put on a show. Mezzo Joyce DiDonato might just be the queen of this select band, and between the projections, smoke, sound effects, costume changes, lighting design and a solo dancer, her latest project throws down the gauntlet to any singer who thinks it’s enough just to learn the music and turn up in a clean frock.

Like Proust's In Search of Lost Time, Abel Gance's Napoléon is the monument of a genius badly in need of self-editing. In both instances, everything testifies to the singular vision of the artist - in Gance's case, his innovations in the field of film technology, from hand-held-camera mayhem to three-screen novelty in the final sequence which ends up in tricolour (earlier, tints and tones in greens, purples and reds, inter alia, articulate the underlying moods of certain scenes).

Is there anything on a concert programme more guaranteed to make the heart lift – or to prove that a conductor has their musical priorities straight – than a Haydn symphony? If you're tired of Haydn, you're tired of life: there’s no music more joyous, more inventive or more resistant to vanity. Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla chose his Symphony No 6 of 1761, called Le Matin for its opening sunrise and the freshness of its ideas, and it was a delight.

Human sacrifice and long-term reconciliation are serious matters for music-drama. Not that you'd know it from Handel's pasticcio or confectionary of previous operatic hits, nor from Gerard Jones's one-note production. For strip-cartoon violence Tarantino-style you need panache, and there’s little of that here. Interesting, too, that Handel gets hardly a look-in throughout the interview Jones the Younger gives in the programme. More important, does he serve the fledgling dramatic abilities of fellow trainees on the Royal Opera's Jette Parker Young Artists Programme?

His transformational Brahms series with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra may have been truncated by slipped disc troubles - he was much missed at Glyndebourne too - but Robin Ticciati is back with renewed energy and purpose. To judge from the brilliant but focused party they seemed to be having with Mozart's "Jupiter" Symphony last night, the players are as overjoyed as he is.

Australian Ballet's cinema broadcast on Tuesday night appears to have been a little under-publicised – at least in my local multiplex, which was deafeningly empty with just five spectators.

Pace-perfect musical articulation and meaningful surprises in the direction: both were to be expected after the conductor-generated sludge and the production overkill of the new Royal Opera Così fan tutte. Mark Wigglesworth has form in Mozart at ENO, with the best of Cosìs way back and a bewitching revival of The Magic Flute this year. Last night he and the ENO Orchestra put no foot wrong. Richard Jones, his dream first-time collaborator, offered the expected twists and symmetries though perhaps not all the connections in between.

In a world of terrifyingly serious news, the opening of the Royal Ballet season with Frederick Ashton's pastoral frolic La Fille mal gardée might seem like a wanton disregard for reality, like a brass band playing "Oh I do like to be beside the seaside" as the Titanic goes down. But that is to misunderstand the reason Fille is so beloved is that it has at its heart a perfectly serious and realistic topic: young love.

Prospects hadn't seemed that great for this new Covent Garden Così. Could Semyon Bychkov, powerful earth-and-fire conductor of Richard Strauss's darker operas, possibly find the right proportions of air and water in Mozart? Would German director Jan Philipp Gloger prove better than his Bayreuth reputation? As it happened, the sextet of half-unknown principals never sang less than respectably, and the production had some good ideas, though mostly linked to the look of expensive sets rather than to focused work on the psychology of confused lovers.

Papa Haydn might have been tickled to see his early intermezzo, La Canterina, pack out the Wigmore Hall on a Monday night. A night for connoisseurs, then, but Classical Opera has form when it comes to refreshing classical repertoire with the elixir of vocal youth. And with a line-up boasting Susanna Hurrell, Rachel Kelly, Kitty Whately and Robert Murray, this was no exception.