Miss Fortune in name and deed. Sad to say but Judith Weir’s sixth opera is an embarrassment.

It’s on occasions like this that the star-rating system runs into irreconcilable difficulties. I honestly cannot remember a time when musical and theatrical values were in such total divergence.

Anna Karenina famously ends with a train. In the Mariinsky Ballet's new adaptation of Tolstoy's novel, you get trains all the way through. An elaborate carriage set looms through dry ice and clunks round on a revolve, all but elbowing its way to the front of the stage. It's a laborious effect that never looks as if it's going to work smoothly. Unfortunately, it sets the tone for the ballet.

Bring together three of the most intuitive talents (and biggest stars) on the planet, meld them under the baton of Antonio Pappano whose command of every caress, swoon, and dramatic impulse of Puccini’s Tosca is not learned but instinctively felt and you have a recipe for the kind of evening that gives the Royal Opera its truly international status.

The words are in French but still familiar - “Once upon a time...” – and the story which follows, Cendrillon (that’s Cinderella to you and me), is writ large across the surfaces of Barbara de Limburg’s set, opening like a pop-up book of fairytales whose sliding panels have our eyes hanging on to every word.

One can only hope that the ill wind which strips away the cherry blossom at the close of Patrice Caurier and Moshe Leiser’s feeble 2003 production of Madama Butterfly might soon carry off the entire staging.

Over the past few years, the Royal Opera House, bastion of high culture and one of the Britain’s biggest arts organisations, has shown a knack for generating populist appeal.

Less is more: in James MacMillan's music, every note counts. And never more so than in Clemency, the Scottish composer's brand-new chamber opera, which packs questions powerful, emotional, philosophical and religious into just 45 minutes. With his regular librettist Michael Symmons Roberts and the director Katie Mitchell, MacMillan has created a terrifically intense, focused and inspired musical work on a thought-provoking parable, updated to the present day.

The Royal Opera's first staging of The Tsar's Bride invites chilling comparisons with today's Russia, says Jessica Duchen

After the epic inanities of Mike Figgis’s cinematic take on ‘Lucrezia Borgia’ at the Coliseum - whose only saving grace was a trio of superb voices - it was sweet relief to encounter David McVicar’s ‘Magic Flute’ at Covent Garden. McVicar may have his own way of going over the top, but in this classic production, now in its third revival, he doesn’t put a foot wrong.

So the arts cuts have claimed their first victim. The Royal Opera House's grandiose plan to open a northern outpost in Manchester bites the dust. It goes to show that the cuts, worrying as they are, can also be an opportunity for sound common sense.

The passing of La Stupenda, Dame Joan Sutherland, cast a long dark shadow over the evening and maybe it was that which gave this revival of Verdi’s Rigoletto (Gilda was one of many roles she famously sang at Covent Garden) an added frisson of commitment and excitement.

The mis en scène of some operas really is best left to the imagination.

Ailish Tynan plays a short, fat, bald man in David Alden's staging of Handel's Radamisto at ENO. It is, she says, an occupational hazard when venturing into the cross-gender world of 18th century opera.