So the world didn't end yesterday as predicted, and Wagner's divine comedy about the meaning of art has weathered the ironic apocalypse following Hitler’s misappropriation. Bayreuth reels, but we Brits are lucky to have two stagings in under a year which take the humanism at face value. Scaling it down for Glyndebourne's intimate summer paradise, given director David McVicar’s knack of finding a plausible historical setting, should have offered a viable alternative to Richard Jones's hallucinogenically wonderful Welsh National Opera production. Often it did. The problem was that several singers were a size or two too small, one way or another, for the shoes cobbled by master craftsman Wagner.

In a London Philharmonic season playing safer than before, principal conductor Vladimir Jurowski has earned the right to a few meat-and-two-veg programmes. Even in a concert containing more than a handful of your hundred best tunes, Wagnerian carrots and Straussian greens were presented pleasingly al dente, with a prelude to this crack team's longest ever impending Glyndebourne journey and the most secure of all living dramatic sopranos soaring assuredly. And Jurowski always serves up prime cuts of Tchaikovsky freshly, without rich sauce. After a discombobulating Pathétique Symphony a couple of seasons back, duly recorded, this was a Fifth veering more to the Classical than the Romantic, felt in the gut rather than the heart.

So it's official: the Metropolitan Opera is more "important" than Covent Garden - at least to the rather image-conscious Fabio Luisi, currently rated as one of the possible successors to New York's now-ailing supremo of the last 40 years, James Levine. He's ditching two performances of a musically resplendent Aida at the Royal Opera for Wagner at the Met.

What a versatile master is the Royal Opera’s resident dynamo Antonio Pappano. On Saturday night, he was in the Covent Garden pit getting big-band sounds and tender elegies from the whole orchestra in Turnage’s Anna Nicole. And here he was again, moving from a surprisingly fine score to a great one, the shadow-of-mortality approach to Chinese poetry that is Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde, albeit in its ingenious chamber reduction by Schoenberg. Oh, and with the small detail of a mezzo’s ultimate challenge being faced by a baritone.

Some of you will know that Wagner and I haven't been seeing eye to eye of late. Last year's Tannhäuser I believed was the end of the road for the two of us. Not quite. With one of the most celebrated Wagner productions of the past two decades returning to the English National Opera last night - Nikolaus Lehnhoff's Parsifal - I decided to give him a final chance. My whole mind, body and soul was primed to repel it, yet I came out almost blubbing.

The beautiful voice is no more. I know the tag has been applied recently to Renée Fleming, but for liquid-gold soprano sound, there has never been anyone to surpass Dame Margaret Price, who died yesterday in her native Wales three months short of her 70th birthday. Few singers have covered a wider range with such poise and style; in the April 2007 edition of the BBC Music Magazine we placed her Number Eight among the Top 20 Greatest Sopranos of All Time (I now recall she was Number Three on my own list, after Callas and Sutherland, of course).

The beautiful voice is no more. I know the tag has been applied recently to Renée Fleming, but for liquid-gold soprano sound, there has never been anyone to surpass Dame Margaret Price, who died yesterday in her native Wales three months short of her 70th birthday. Few singers have covered a wider range with such poise and style; in the April 2007 edition of the BBC Music Magazine we placed her Number Eight among the Top 20 Greatest Sopranos of All Time (I now recall she was Number Three on my own list, after Callas and Sutherland, of course).

Exactly an hour and a half after Wagner's first orchestral brew of sex and religion had raised the curtain on the Royal Opera Tannhäuser, the pilgrims and floozies were at it again over the other side of town. If there was hardly the whiff of elemental theatrics ahead in Jiří Bělohlávek's surprisingly staid conducting of the overture, different treats were in store: the most opulent and musicianly of all living sopranos, Christine Brewer, in cheerful love songs by a nearly forgotten Austrian composer, and a smells-and-bells pilgrimage up a mountain and down ennobling Richard Strauss's most natural orchestral work.