Opera: Great singing - pity about the productions

The question arises once again: can an evening at the opera really prove satisfying if the musical values are high but the reasons for them – the drama, the theatre of opera – are found wanting. Depressingly, I suspect that most people you address with this question will answer an unhesitating "Yes, of course." Music-drama is exactly what it says it is: a symbiotic relationship. As the recent experience of Parsifal at the Royal Opera demonstrated, the music-making can be sublime but what does it amount to if the staging is technically and intellectually lazy?

The same was true of the Royal Opera's Jenufa – another stunning musical performance in a fatally flawed new production. Neither originated at the Royal Opera, and again the general consensus was that because the musical values were so high the production could be quietly written off as "collateral damage". It couldn't, and shouldn't.

Still, at least the Royal Opera is not locked into a self-deluding time-warp like the Kirov Opera's Verdi season. And before anyone accuses me of knocking tradition, the most cogent display of music and drama working hand-in-glove was Sir Peter Hall's staging of Verdi's Otello at Glyndebourne. This production may have looked "traditional" (whatever that means) but it was as unhackneyed and powerful as any I've seen. How? Through asking who these characters are, what motivates them, how they relate to one another. But in the world of opera, where emotions tend to be worn like achievement medals, the "how" question more often asked is: "How can I make the most of me?"

Deborah Warner asked the right questions of Beethoven's Fidelio and concentrated on the human factor. Marzelline was played by Lisa Milne, who stole our hearts again in one of the highlights of the English National Opera season – Annabel Arden's deliciously creepy production of The Rake's Progress. In an opera full of allusion and counter-allusion, theatrical sleight of hand was just what the devil ordered.

The highs and lows of ENO's season were pretty dramatic. Company shows like Tim Albery's impressive mounting of War and Peace and the sensational revival of Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk – exploding once again like a gaudy Soviet propaganda cartoon – carried with them a huge sense of collective pride. But the lows – as in Mozart's Don Giovanni and Figaro – were inexcusable. How interesting that poverty of ideas should manifest itself in piles of junk and garbage. Let's hope it's not recycleable.

Highlights
'Otello'
'Fidelio'
'The Rake's Progress'
'Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk'
'War and Peace'