Since its première in 1984, Andrei Serban’s production of Puccini’s Turandot has been revived 15 times at Covent Garden, not counting excursions to Wembley Arena. The current revival has been running (by all accounts, to capacity houses) since 10  March. The compelling reason for reviewing such a well-worn revival mid-run is that this performance featured the Royal Opera debut of the Nottingham-born Wagnerian soprano Catherine Foster – which by any reckoning was well overdue.

Foster is hugely esteemed in the German-speaking world. In itself, that doesn’t prove anything – I mean, they rate Franz Welser-Möst too. ‘Big in Germany’ is often brandished as a rebuke to an imagined Little British artistic parochialism, but I suspect the full story of Foster’s long absence from Covent Garden is more complex and more mundane than that; and probably known only to her agent and the Royal Opera’s casting department. The mandarins of Floral Street are inscrutable: they’ve never booked Anthony Negus or restaged The Ice Break either. Anyway, she’s here now, with a reputation and a track record – six consecutive Brünnhildes at Bayreuth – that should be catnip to any lover of late-Romantic opera.

And rightly. Foster draws the eye and holds it; a majestic and forbidding ice princess whose brief flash of curious, contemptuous eye contact with Calaf (Yonghoon Lee) in Act One establishes her stature before she’s sung a note. And when she does sing…well, with one exception (we’ll come to that in a moment) this is not a Turandot that’s big on vocal subtlety. Not a problem: Puccini’s characters are fairy-tale figures enacting archetypal emotions. So Foster blazes, but it’s a formidably controlled burn, rising towards the climax of ‘In questa reggia’ with a cool command that was matched by some of Antonio Pappano’s most sophisticated (and sensuous) conducting. Foster’s voice powers like a searchlight through massive choral and orchestral climaxes; the pride of this Princess Turandot is something awful, and her two collapses – into fear (in Act Two), and into what she thinks is love (in Act Three) – are all the more shocking for it.

On this particular night, in addition to Foster and Lee, the love triangle included Ermonela Jaho as Liu. Lee was very much the tenor as swashbuckler: striking heroic attitudes and matching them with brazen, testosterone-charged singing that rang and shone without breaking a sweat. Jaho, meanwhile, gave the whole evening its heart (or at any rate, such heart as this opera possesses): a vulnerable figure in her yellow pajamas, singing with an incandescent, yielding tenderness that kept melting away into quiet longing while everyone else was powering full ahead with drop-forged beams of ice and fire. Liu’s small, sweet scrap of humanity is what makes the ultra-stylised sadism of the rest of the opera so thrillingly piquant – or, if you prefer, so reprehensible – and Jaho could hardly have embodied her more touchingly.

Meanwhile – because who knows how much longer we’ll see Turandot done like this? – it’s worth saying that Serban’s 39-year-old production holds up very well. The phrase ‘a well-loved classic staging’ can be a red flag for bad lighting and interminable scene changes. Zeffirelli’s 1987 Turandot still gets wheeled out by the New York Met and it’s eye-popping: an all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet apparently designed by Liberace. Serban’s, by contrast, deploys brains as well as bling and it’s aged better. True, the wooden-galleried palace is sombre but the original designs (by Sally Jacobs) fill it with living, dancing colour, and the commedia dell’arte-inspired masks and choreography (in Gozzi’s original, Ping, Pong and Pang were Harlequin figures, and their physical acrobatics in this revival are almost as impressive as their singing) neatly wrong-foot vexatious accusations of cultural insensitivity. After a slightly baggy start, it quickly started to spark: all credit to the revival director Jack Furness, whose Rusalka at Garsington last summer massively outclassed the Royal Opera’s own recent staging. There’s a lesson there somewhere.

The London Symphony Orchestra offered a whole evening of Bliss: his music for Alexander Korda’s eerie 1936 film Things to Come, reconstructed and played live (Frank Strobel conducted) alongside a screening of the film. The film – based on H.G. Wells – is a curate’s egg. Between the apocalyptic opening scenes and the dazzling art deco final third where it goes full Flash Gordon, there’s an overlong dystopian central section: imagine Mad Max shot at Denham and starring Sir Cedric Hardwicke. But Bliss’s score is compelling: a streamlined, chrome-toothed fusion of Stravinsky-ish rhythmic futurism and that urgent, overcast romanticism that flourished briefly in the age of anxiety before 1939. The technicalities of these orchestral film projects are doubtless complex and much of the spoken dialogue on the original movie soundtrack was muffled. But Strobel, and the LSO – who recorded the original score in 1936 – got stuck right in, and did their heritage proud.