Kurt Cobain’s “Smells like Teen Spirit’ cued a realistic song and drink routine for Chekhov’s Three Sisters in a hit-and-miss update by director Benedict Andrews. This one, with a Puccini soundtrack unsupportively conducted by Xian Zhang, smells more like routine spirit with a couple of jolts along the way, a sludgy requiem for drug-fuelled twenty-somethings.

September is upon us and it’s nearly time for the new season. English National Opera’s Artistic Director John Berry may have left the building but his enterprising legacy lives on in a 2015-16 season that looks on paper as good as any in the past 20 years; what happens after that is anyone's guess. Still, there shouldn’t be too much grief that ENO Music Director Edward Gardner has moved on, since his successor Mark Wigglesworth already has a fine track record with the company.

When is a famous aria more than just a showpiece? When it’s a narrative of a future event conjured by a hope beyond reason, which is what Madama Butterfly’s “Un bel dì” (“One fine day”) ought to be but so rarely is: too often prima donna overkill and stereotyped mannerisms get in the way. Not with Latvian soprano Kristine Opolais. Her Butterfly’s gestures can be stylised but always unusual, setting her apart, an ex-dancing geisha driven almost mad in a three-year wait for a “husband” who won’t come back. The effort of will sees her crumple in the aftermath of her vision.

Having been bowled over by the total work of art English National Opera made of Wagner’s The Mastersingers of Nuremberg on its first night, I bought tickets immediately afterwards for the final performance. So I’m off tonight to catch the farewell of what has been an unqualified triumph for the company. Yet only last Thursday an unsolicited email arrived from Amazon Local – there’s no stopping them, it seems – offering tickets for this very show at 40 per cent discount.

The good news first: director Christopher Alden’s new production of Gianni Schicchi is quite brilliant, and one of the funniest, cleverest things you’ll see in an opera house. Puccini’s taut one-acter is difficult to mess up, but it takes some skill to present it this well. Alden’s version is full of pleasures. Like Rhys Gannon’s stroppy young Gheradino, who spends most of the action wearing headphones and playing on an iPad. Choreographer Tim Claydon’s mute, acrobatic Buoso Donati leaves this earth with some reluctance, his ghost continuing to haunt the stage.

When everything works – conducting, singing, production, costumes, sets, lighting, choreography where relevant – then there’s nothing like the art of opera. But how often does that happen? In my experience, very seldom, but not this year. It's been of such a vintage that I couldn’t possibly choose the best out of six fully-staged productions – three of them from our only native director of genius, Richard Jones, who as one of his favourite singers, Susan Bullock, put it to me, deserves every gong going – and one concert performance.

ENO may not always have matched the Royal Opera in the Great Puccini Voices stakes. But it's served up many of the classiest Mimìs, with Valerie Masterson, Mary Plazas and Elizabeth Llewellyn as top seamstresses. Californian former beauty queen Angel Blue, an acclaimed Musetta in the previous revival, now joins them.

So now it’s Minnie Get Your Gun from the director who brought us the gobsmackingly inventive Young Vic Annie (as in sharpshooter Oakley, not Little Orphan). Richard Jones’s subversive but still very human take on Irving Berlin discombobulated its American support and never made Broadway; but there’s little here that would rock the steadily progressive Met (home of La fanciulla del West’s 1910 premiere, with Enrico Caruso as “Dick Johnson” aka quickly repentant bandit Ramerrez).

You can usually trust the buzz around rehearsals. From Glyndebourne, five weeks into preparation for La traviata, which opens tomorrow, one of the team working on Tom Cairns’ new production declared in an e-mail conversation that newcomer soprano Venera Gimadieva was possibly the most definitive Violetta yet. And when I was havering over whether to interview American tenor Michael Fabiano, not by then having watched a wealth of stupendous videos on his website, the response was “you absolutely must”.

I met one of the 20^th century’s most impressive, if not always sympathetic, conductors twice, on both occasions to talk Puccini before La Scala recordings of La fanciulla del West (The Girl of the Golden West) and Manon Lescaut.