Geoff Brown

In anyone’s hands, Verdi’s Aida is not the easiest opera to raise up to greatness on the stage. How does a director spotlight hidden subtleties, musical or dramatic, in a libretto and subject so easily swamped by the spectacle of marching breastplates, roaring divas, Egyptian bling and the aroma and sway of live camels? Novice audiences may have their own problems, grappling with characters named Aida, Amneris, Amonasro, Radamès, Ramfis — almost always A and R. If only the librettist, Antonio Ghislanzoni, had called someone Doris. Imagine, then, the difficulties faced when the opera is performed by Opera Australia on a wide-open platform, built over water, at this year’s Handa Opera on Sydney Harbour.

These are nervous times at the opera. When should we expect the gratuitous rape scene? Will the director relocate the action to a Croydon laundrette? Who might be booed, and for how long? With Opera Holland Park’s Lakmé, however, almost any of these diversions might actually be welcome — anything to save us from the tasteful visual torpor that looms over Aylin Bozok’s production like a choking black cloud. Consider the riot of colours embedded in Delibes’ opera. We’re in India in the late 19th century, where officers of the British Raj fly the flag and march to fife and drums. There’s a bustling bazaar and glinting jewellery. Sensuous hues burst from the music. Flowers creep in everywhere, from the luminous lotus to the poisonous datura.

The opera director David Alden has never been one to tread the straight and narrow. Something kinky would emerge, I’m sure, even if he directed the Queen’s televised Christmas message. So matching him up at English National Opera with the madness, obsessions and phantasmagoria of Tchaikovsky’s whirring and troubling The Queen of Spades was simply asking for trouble. The Alden fingerprints quickly emerge. We’re in several periods at the same time: Pushkin’s Imperial Russia, yes, but also Stalin’s ossified Soviet Union, plus splashes of the frivolous 1920s and 60s and a snatch of the 18th century.

Big slats of orange, burning yellows, an Adriatic in electric blue: I wish I’d bought my sunglasses to the Royal Opera’s latest revival of Il turco in Italia. Moshe Leiser and Patrice Caurier’s production of Rossini’s opera buffo first burst on to the Covent Garden stage in 2005, and its shrieking colours haven’t dimmed with the years. For good or bad, this is one show when you do actually come out whistling the sets (they’re by Christian Fenouillat). I was humming Agostino Cavalca’s costumes too, from gypsy confusion through bouncing fezzes to the absurd glitter of the climactic masked ball.

Otello ENO, in rep until 17 October Anna Nicole Royal Opera, in rep until 24 September So how did London’s two big opera companies launch their new seasons last week? Not perhaps in the way you might expect. Decked with pink balloons and the acrid smell of popcorn, the Royal Opera House waved the garish contemporary flag with Mark-Anthony Turnage and Richard Thomas’s Anna Nicole of 2011, revived before a youthful opening-night crowd attracted by specially subsidised tickets. It was left to the friskier English National Opera to offer a new production of sober mien and an audience containing some people who dressed up.