Live, Video: Find classical music concert, opera, ballet and dance reviews | Raphaela Papadakis

An opera only ever performed once, over 300 years ago. Would this be a marvellous revival, or a reminder of why it has been neglected all this time?

I’m sure before long I’ll see a production of Daisy Pulls It Off that opens with modern day soldiers charging onto the stage waving rifles about – it seems to be the first image directors reach for these days.

Opera school productions are designed to provide experience for their students and showcase their talents to an audience sprinkled with casting directors. Clearly, the Guildhall School have decided to extract maximum value from their current production by staging not one opera but three, with different casts and even different orchestral musicians.

The final of this year’s Handel Singing Competition, which opened the 2012 London Handel Festival, was a rare occasion when the winner of the First Prize matched the winner of the Audience Prize, giving satisfaction all round.

It might be a useful “rule of thumb” for every director of opera, to imagine the audience will be coming to the opera for the first time and view his own job as giving maximum clarity to the production he or she is working on.

Mozart's Magic Flute is so well-known and so well-loved that a director must tread a tricky path. If the production is too conventional, he is accused of being boring and hackneyed; if it's too full of clever inventive ideas, he is accused of betraying the original. Fortunately, the director has one overriding thing going for him: Mozart's music.