Opera North has begun 2023 with a couple of big revivals, and it’s always rewarding to call in on these things and see how they’re holding up. The long-lived, endlessly revived classic production is one of the quirks of operatic culture. It actually feels disconcerting, as a regular operagoer, to go to the conventional theatre (you know, the vanilla kind where they don’t sing) and discover that they’ve started again from scratch. A completely new Tempest? What was wrong with the 2016 staging? Possibly it’s to do with the financial realities of an art form that needs to keep a full orchestra and chorus on the payroll. A Year Zero policy every other season simply isn’t economically viable.

Or possibly it’s because some opera productions are just so close to perfect that they can seem like the last word. The Miller Mikado is one; the Cox/Hockney Rake’s Progress (due out again at Glyndebourne this summer, and looking spry at 48), is another. In its 43rd year, Sir David Pountney’s staging of The Cunning Little Vixen has been around a bit. But the dancing, tumbling insects and animals; the birds in their rocking chairs; set designer Maria Bjornson’s billowy counterpane of patchwork fields – they still just feel so right. In the scene changes – the points where some elderly productions creak loudest – Pountney’s Vixen defies age. There’s one particular visual effect (regulars will know, but on the Mousetrap principle it wouldn’t do to spoil it for first-timers) that’s so simple and yet so magical that the Leeds audience laughed out loud in surprise and delight.

Pountney oversaw this latest revival in person and took a bow at the end, sideburned and waistcoated like some yeoman farmer out of Thomas Hardy. You might say that he’s come to resemble Janacek’s Forester, but in the current cast, James Rutherford plays the Forester as a fresh-faced, almost laddish countryman, dominating the Parson (Henry Waddington) and the Schoolmaster (Paul Nilon – a picture of tragicomic despair) and pushing his taproom banter slightly too far, just as the Vixen pushes her own luck to snapping point. She’s played this time around by Elin Pritchard: exuberant and wide-eyed, with a sunbeam soprano that bounces effortlessly over Janacek’s bristling orchestra.

Andrew Gourlay, conducting, was particularly good at finding the right gear for the motor rhythms, then suddenly drenching the whole scene in sunset warmth. Rutherford, too, opened out gloriously in the final scene. Janacek doesn’t do conventional sentiment, and I suspect Pountney has spiced up the English translation (his own) for this revival. Certainly, the phrase ‘dirty slapper’ feels new. But why not? This opera lives on its instincts, pungent with blood, fur and musk. However familiar her setting, the Vixen should always be ready to bite.

The other revival is Edward Dick’s production of Tosca, and it’s probably too early to say whether it has the same staying power. When it first appeared in 2018, the consensus was that this was a contemporary Tosca and the slick, gloomy sets (by Tom Scutt) and millennial-ish costumes (Cavaradossi as a slacker, Tosca as a retro-chic starlet) give things the air of an expensive espionage thriller set in a priest-ridden near-future dystopia. His Dark Materials, perhaps, with a twist of Fifty Shades of Grey. Robert Hayward’s G-man Scarpia wears a black suit and rubs pervily against the designer furniture of his executive shag-pad, before opening his laptop so Tosca can watch her lover being tortured via webcam. That was clever, and genuinely horrible.

The banks of spotlights behind the set are the most obviously dated visual element; an overused design fad that’s already starting to feel as pre-Covid as the picture of Donald Trump that appears, risibly, in the programme. Pull a drama out of its original setting and yes, there’s all sorts of scope for sharpening its subtext and interrogating its assumptions. But you do need to preserve the basics of internal logic, and in scenes such as Act One’s climactic religious procession, and Cavaradossi’s execution (by masked paramilitaries, for some reason, when we’ve seen that this is an unembarrassed and highly efficient police state), you sensed that Dick wasn’t entirely sure what to do.

Overall, though, it’s striking and it hurts, really quite nastily, where it’s supposed to hurt. Of the current cast, Hayward and Giselle Allan (Tosca) both took these roles in 2018, and Hayward, in particular, combines pale, clenched menace with some disarmingly seductive singing. Neither Allan nor Mykhailo Malafi (Cavaradossi) sounded on peak vocal form on the night I heard them, but Allan’s Tosca is still compellingly vulnerable and volatile and Garry Walker conducted in the present tense: drawing orchestral playing that was restless, high-res and streaked with savagery. I mean it as a compliment when I say that ‘Vissi d’arte’ has rarely sounded less sweet.