Men and supermen, aristocratic women and suicidal Trojan Wags, ancient Carthage, modern Venezuela, a pre-Columbian tropical jungle and a groovy 1960s-style conga: last week had more spectacle than a Charlton Heston retrospective, more geography and climatics than a Met Office weather map. Hannibal made an appearance, as did the Alps, though not, inconsiderately, at the same time. The Simón Bolívars and Gustavo Dudamel stole hearts – yet again; is there any more to say? – and Mozart, Antonio Pappano and Ann Murray, in no particular order, melted them.
To start with the biggest: Hector Berlioz considered his choice of subject for his five-act epic, Les Troyens, "elevated, magnificent and deeply moving" while knowing that his Paris audiences might find it dull and boring. He worried that the staging would be full of "idiotic obstacles" and that he would never find a woman sufficiently intelligent, "with a soul and heart of fire", for the central role of Dido, Queen of Carthage.
Covent Garden's new staging by David McVicar, done in one evening, as Berlioz intended, instead of the more manageable two, was a valiant effort, and the first in that theatre since 1972. Whatever the longueurs – and on a first night lasting nearly six hours there were a few – you have to praise the enterprise, the risk, the grandeur and the star quality of the cast. Even without Jonas Kaufmann, who would have taken the role of Aeneas to another level of Trojan heroic excitement but pulled out through illness, there was plenty of expert singing.
His replacement, the American tenor Bryan Hymel, scaled all the top notes and had a certain heroic manner, but would you, like Dido, mount a funeral pyre for him? Anna Caterina Antonacci, the foot-stamping crowd's favourite, conjured plenty of vocal magic as the doom-mongering Cassandra, and in the generous, touching performance of Eva-Maria Westbroek, Berlioz's dream of an intelligent Dido was substantially realised.
The music of this misshapen masterpiece, variously martial, lyrical, melodic and thrilling, gleams and blazes then occasionally gutters to a mere flicker. Antonio Pappano, conducting, drew magisterial playing from the Royal Opera House orchestra. At times the pacing felt too leisurely, yet the excitement of the triumphal moments, with top quality chorus work, more than compensates. Among the supporting cast, Brindley Sherratt's wise Narbal stood out.
Straddling all centuries, from antiquity to the second French empire of Berlioz's time to the modern day, the sets are ambitious and effective. As designer of the closing ceremony of the 2012 Olympics, as well as for Take That, U2 and Lady Gaga, Es Devlin has a bold, untrammelled imagination. Troy and Carthage are linked visually, the ugliness of a war-torn city replaced, in the second part, by the golden north African heat of a country at peace. A closely detailed model of the city of Carthage is suspended over some of the action like an omniscient egg or a winking space station. Berlioz's stage directions are taken into account, right down to lightning hitting a tree in the Royal Hunt and Storm music, the flaming branch being carried off by dancers – the best part of some woeful choreography. McVicar has taken the description of scenes as "tableaux" rather too literally, when more action would have helped the pace, but there are no easy solutions to this difficult work.
The animatronic Trojan horse, made up of the cogs, wheels and myriad components of an armoury, returns in the form of a man – Hannibal? Both are gigantic, as befits this state-of-the-art London 2012 production. A lasting image of Les Troyens, as well as a musical high point, was the ecstatic duet between the doomed lovers Dido and Aeneas ("Nuit d'ivresse et d'exstase infinie"), sung as night falls and the Carthaginian hillside becomes illuminated by tiny lights.
Since it opened with Le nozze di Figaro on 28 May 1934, Glyndebourne has always had Mozart at its heart. A new Figaro is therefore a nerve-racking event, especially with your young music director-in-waiting in the pit. Robin Ticciati takes over from Vladimir Jurowski in 2014. This is a decently cast show, hard to fault and full of humour yet with much exploration of Mozart's infinitely complex score, as well as Da Ponte's scintillating text, still to be done.
Michael Grandage, directing, played safe. "I'm not particularly interested in coming up with a high-concept approach that distorts the work and makes it difficult to understand," he says in a programme interview, giving a fair account of the enjoyable if mildly docile affair that results. Concept or not, the action is updated from the late 18th-century, governed by rigid social hierarchies vital to Mozart's opera, to the late 1960s, thus knocking out a layer of the action in a blow, or rendering it all but senseless.
The Count and Countess arrive at their ritzy Andalucian summer palace in a two-tone red and cream convertible, she in a Pucci-style chiffon-silk designer kaftan, he in velvet suit with leonine, Sgt Pepper-era hair. You expect David Hockney's Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy to follow shortly in an Aston Martin. Equally we seem to have got trapped in an Iris Murdoch novel, with Mozart's characters wrestling their moral, social and sexual uncertainties, helped on by recognisable types: the oleaginous gossip Don Basilio (Alan Oke), the mini-skirted young Barbarina (Sarah Shafer), the convincingly louche old bore Bartolo (Andrew Shore) and, filling the stage with her extraordinary presence and still glowing voice, the veteran Ann Murray as the shrewish Marcellina.
The effect, entertaining enough, was to flatten Mozart's perfect musical and dramatic structure. You never felt the full weight of the Countess's anguish, or the ugliness of the Count's anger (Sally Matthews and Audun Iversen). Similarly Figaro and Susanna, affably taken by Vito Priante and Lydia Teuscher, lacked that final touch of esprit. Figaro was more the posh boy doing a summer job rather than the canny barber of Seville who in effect engineered the Count's marriage to Rosina in the first place.
Ticciati chose ideal, unhurried tempi and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment delivered incisive playing, yet the sparks have yet to fly. The farcical unravellings of the first act were wittily done, with Isabel Leonard a delightful, agile Cherubino. The audience chuckled responsively, especially when it came to the disco dancing and conga-ing of the wedding party scene. Some even clapped along. Glyndebourne's founder, John Christie, must have been wriggling, if not jiving, in his grave. The production will be semi-staged at the BBC Proms on 28 August before joining Glyndebourne Tour this autumn with a new cast. Watch the live screening at cinemas or via the Guardian on 17 August.
The last event in the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra of Venezuela's UK tour – available online until Wednesday – attracted the infectious enthusiasm and buzz that all this group's concerts now guarantee. Their magicianly conductor, Gustavo Dudamel, inspired almighty collective energy and some top-class solo playing for Esteban Benzecry's Rituales Amerindios and Strauss's An Alpine Symphony. Both works, grandiose pictorial enterprises as if looking down on the world from a hot-air balloon, push the orchestral sound to bursting point. Of all the critical verbiage available to describe this music one word will do: loud.
For the encore, Bryn Terfel made a surprise appearance in eyepatch and helmet as Wotan, and sang from the end of Wagner's Rheingold. It was the shortest rendition of another well-known musical marathon, but after this week of excess, modesty was called for. Terfel sang wondrously, and brandished his spear so freely and excitingly that the principal second violin had to shift his chair in order not to have his ribs tickled. It was a great advertisement for Terfel's BrynFest, taking place at the Southbank this weekend. But for now, after travelling the world in 80 hours and doing an industrious workout on the time machine, I am going to lie down in a darkened room.
