If you read the synopsis of Candide - which I strongly advise if you plan a visit to this new WNO production - you may well wonder how it will be possible to get through so much in so short a time. Voltaire’s novella is itself fairly short, but opera takes more time and songs are songs, not action.

This frothy bio-fantasy about the 18th century composer Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges and top tunesmith to Marie Antoinette at the French court, could have been a powerful and revealing shout-out to a woefully under-appreciated composer.

Directed by Stephen Williams with a screenplay by Stefani Robinson, it’s more like Bridgerton Goes to the French Revolution, an absurd bouillabaisse of melodrama and characters who may be elegantly dressed but are uniformly paper-thin.

Innovation is always a risky business. Opera North’s vision and ambition for this production is to create, in effect, a new genre: a combination of staged choral-orchestral performance with contemporary dance.

Partnership and diversity are the buzz words – good ones, too – and the concept brings together the opera company’s soloists, chorus and orchestra with dancers from both Leeds-based Phoenix Dance Theatre and South Africa’s Jazzart Dance Theatre, plus some help from Capetown Opera.

Why stage Don Giovanni in a post #MeToo world? That’s the question most frequently being asked about Mariame Clément’s new production for Glyndebourne and on its opening night she delivered a response that was as conceptually subtle as it was visually flamboyant.

There’s a moment in the opening stretch of Giles Terera’s The Meaning of Zong where you think the former Hamilton star has written a piece about slavery that’s in much the same idiom as the hit musical. 

The turbulence and agitation of betrayal could be felt from the word go in this galvanising performance of the St John Passion, which administered a jolting urgency to Bach’s radical portrayal of the Easter story. The work will be 300 years old next year, yet this Polyphony Good Friday performance – a fixture at St John’s Smith Square for slightly fewer years – delivered a version as fresh and discomfiting as if the crucifixion had taken place yesterday.

This Palm Sunday served up an epiphany. Previous encounters with Handel's Messiah, in whatever version, and whether listening or performing, turned out to have been through a glass darkly. And here we were face to face with undiluted genius, served with total consistency by 26 musicians running the gamut from intimacy through fury to great blazes, all guided by the extraordinary spirit of IBO artistic director Peter Whelan.

When your special guest is a young soprano with all the world before her, the total artist already, your programme might seem to run itself. Yet the Dunedin Consort’s sequence seen and heard in Glasgow, Edinburgh and (last night) London followed a proper musical logic, running together an overture, a ballet and a cantata in the first half, and pulling focus on Handel’s early years in Rome, all supremely inventive music – though the later G minor Concerto Grosso which launched the second half is in a class of its own.

It was very much the formula as before, as Jean-Efflam Bavouzet and Gábor Takács-Nagy moved their edition of the Mozart piano concertos a step closer to completion with Nos. 11, 12 and 13.

Raw, muscular, visceral, haunting – this was Handel as you’ve never experienced him before. In this striking entry for the London Handel Festival,  an uncompromising production by Adele Thomas with conductor Laurence Cummings took four of the composer’s early cantatas about thwarted love and mined them for all their incandescent rage and poisoned wistfulness.