La donna del lago, Garsington, Oxfordshire, Thurs to 7 July
Death in Venice, Aldeburgh, Suffolk
Don Giovanni, Royal Opera House, London WC2, to 8 July
Like his twin brother Christopher and all too many other globally renowned opera directors, David Alden can be maddeningly inconsistent. For every award-winning Jenufa or Ariodante at ENO, there are two or three eccentric turkeys gobbling their way round provincial houses. Now he has elected to head into rural England and immediately, infuriatingly, disastrously caught the country-house bug.
Rossini may be best known for his comedies, but the mature composer also wrote ornate, high-romantic dramas. One such is La donna del lago, the first Italian opera to be based on a Walter Scott novel, inspiring 25 more in the two decades after its 1819 premiere, not least Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor
We might never have enjoyed such riches if Alden had directed La donna's premiere. At Garsington he reduces this noble work to a shambolic panto. Perhaps it is because he's American that Alden signs up to the general belief that black-tied, champagne-quaffing English country-house audiences must be made to laugh, and have a jolly evening out, whatever the work on offer.
So the rebel Scottish army becomes a bunch of can-swilling lager louts, staggering around the stage in a parody of music-hall insobriety. The trouser-role romantic lead, Malcolm, is a punk in Sex Pistols T-shirt and Doc Martens. Mustachioed deer smoke cigars and read Country Life, pickpocketing their drunken hunters. The baddie, Rodrigo, does a Ricky Gervais stand-up routine in horns and leather jacket; when he gets angry he starts, guess what, overturning tables and chairs. Yes, just about every available stage cliche is on view.
Only the heroine, Elena, manages to maintain some semblance of dignity amid this puerile chaos, though the vocal range of Carmen Giannattasio is severely stretched by Rossini's coloratura demands. The same proves true of the tenors Colin Lee, Michael Colvin and all other principals. David Parry conducts with more enthusiasm than finesse, while Alden makes a Monty Python mockery of high Rossini. The audience, of course, loved it.
The Aldeburgh festival, by contrast, can be relied on for high seriousness - too high at times, perhaps, under the leadership of Thomas Ades, but spot-on in the case of its founder Benjamin Britten's Death in Venice. If the National Geographic naturalism of Deborah Warner's recent production reduced the ENO audience to embarrassed voyeurs, the Japanese-style simplicity and elegance of Yoshi Oida's staging turns the work into the dialectical dispute between Apollo and Dionysus that Britten had in mind.
A couple of slats across a flooded stage, the rippling water reflected on the backdrop - that's all it takes, along with a few striped-shirt gondoliers, to create the doom-laden Venetian backdrop to von Aschenbach's tragedy. This is a work that needs to be thus stylised to avoid the familiar charges made against it, to elevate its subject matter from literalistic tabloid fodder to the artistic and human agonies Britten chose to address in such boldly personal terms.
It also requires an Aschenbach of high dignity, with whom we can identify, even empathise, whatever our sexuality. Alan Oke carried it off superbly, with powerful support from Peter Sidhom in the multiple baritone roles, hovering at the edge of the stage throughout as the personification of death intended by the composer. With the meticulous Paul Daniel wringing mature playing from the Britten-Pears Orchestra, this was as fine an account of this fascinating work as I have seen; how tragic that one of the most distinguished productions of the year is already history after only a handful of performances.
Back in London, Francesca Zambello's fickle finger of fate again swings over Don Giovanni, costing Covent Garden a state-subsidised fortune as its flames heat up the stalls and subvert centuries of theatrical tradition. Why keep the phrase 'stone guest' in the surtitles if you're not even going to have a statue on stage, let alone one that sings, nods its head and comes to dinner?
Thus, with change for the sake of change, do megalomaniac directors devalue the treasures in their charge. Despite the late Maria Bjornson's rather dull, multi-purpose set, this is otherwise an unexceptionable reading of Mozart's masterwork, with the dream casting of Erwin Schrott as a sexy, insinuating Don, Kyle Ketelsen as an engaging Leporello and Marina Poplavskaya stylishly replacing the indisposed Anna Netrebko as an unusually glamorous Anna. The entire cast, for once, can act. The sole problem is the uninspired conducting of Ivor Bolton, lacking the attack, energy and edge required to lift this work into the theatrical powerhouse it is.
