Angela Gheorghiu is  everyone’s idea of the  superstar opera singer: a hugely gifted soprano with electric stage presence, who also happens to be beautiful, full of star quality and something of a diva to boot.

Call it crazy, call it genius, but undaunted by the British weather, the Aldeburgh Festival is mounting one of its most ambitious projects ever: Benjamin Britten’s operatic masterpiece Peter Grimes, live on the Aldeburgh beach. The shore faces eastwards to the North Sea, the winds can bite and storms often re-sculpt the pebbly surface. It is sold out nonetheless. Staging this opera here is certainly appropriate: the action takes place in this small Suffolk fishing community and Britten’s music is filled with powerful evocations of its sea and sky.

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Who could take the plot of La donna del lago seriously? Probably not even its first audience in Naples.

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Gioachino Rossini's La Donna del Lago (“The Lady of the Lake”), which has just opened at the Royal Opera House, is an operatic rarity of the first order – hardly ever performed, according to its director, John Fulljames, because its leading roles are so demanding. “You have to have the right constellation of stars to pull it off,” he says. “That only happens once in a generation.”

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One of the more interesting of the tide of Britten centenary tributes, The Canticles features the five vocal settings composed at various points between 1947 and 1974, in which the ostensible religious themes disguise more secular interests – the barely veiled homoeroticism of Francis Quarles' 17th-century adoration of Christ in "Canticle I", the allegorical linking of Blitz and Crucifixion in the Edith Sitwell poem used for "Canticle III" etc.

Two highly sympathetic soprano soloists (Judith van Wanroij and Machteld Baumans) and the warm chorales and clean fugal entries of the Consensus Vocalis choir make a persuasive argument for Jan Willem de Vriend's recording of "Lobgesang".

There's a moment, early on in “Ein Schwert verhiess mir der Vater”, the opening selection of this superb collection of Wagner arias and lieder, when Jonas Kaufmann, as Siegmund, lets out the huge, long cries of “Wälse!” with extraordinary power.