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Opera Holland Park starts its 2018 season with a bang (and a cough), offering a splendid new production of La traviata. Lauren Fagan is a sensational Violetta, but the production is a real company effort and achievement.

A tight production from Martin Lloyd-Evans together with a strong cast and loving treatment from conductor Matthew Kofi Waldren made a strong case for more regular performances of this neglected gem.

The most Scottish of operas, Verdi's Macbeth, makes big demands on its soloists and is packed with choruses, so it was interesting to see how Scottish Opera's production managed with only seven singers and a chamber orchestra.

Whatever Puccini’s Madama Butterfly has going for it, it isn’t suspense – everything that’s going to happen is spelled out the first few pages of the score, as Pinkerton chuckles that the marriage contracts in Japan are as flexible as the property leases, renegotiable on a monthly basis, and toasts the day he gets married “for real” to an American bride.

It is always a challenge to take live opera to the places opera does not reach, and let’s face it, many people live a distance from the main performing venues. A long drive home after a three-hour opera or an overnight stay in the city weeds out all but the dedicated followers.

Howling, gusting wind. Damp, bitter cold. Dark, gathering twilight. Exactly the right atmosphere, you must agree, for Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor, based on Sir Walter Scott's romantic historical novel of dark deeds in the grim castles of the Scottish clans, which opened Opera Holland Park's new season.

Pietro Mascagni was catapulted to enduring fame in 1889 when his Cavalleria Rusticana won a competition. But the problem with all Italian opera composers at the end of the 19th century was simple: if you weren't Puccini, it was more or less impossible to avoid his shadow.