Lightning sometimes strikes twice. English Touring Opera hit topical gold last spring when, wholly by coincidence, they found themselves touring with Rimsky-Korsakov’s Russian anti-war satire The Golden Cockerel. Now the company’s general director Robin Norton-Hale insists that their current tour of Rossini’s Il viaggio a Reims – written in 1825 to celebrate the coronation of King Charles X of France – was fixed long before this month’s events at Westminster Abbey were even a glint in the Earl Marshal’s eye.

Really? In truth, opera planning cycles generally operate in years rather than months. On the other hand, Il viaggio a Reims is an extravagant heap of dramatic (if not musical) flummery. Why would anyone who wasn’t a terminal coloratura junkie stage it without pretext? Assorted national stereotypes gather at an inn en route to the coronation in Reims. A shortage of coach horses leaves them stranded, so they throw a party right there instead.

In the words of Alan Partridge, it really is that simple, and director Valentina Ceschi does her best to jolly along the non-existent drama. Adam Wiltshire’s Bridgerton-ish period costumes are easy on the eye and there are a couple of amusing visual surprises at the ends of Acts One and Two. Meanwhile Rossini revs his engine in neutral and trundles out his huge all-star cast, one after the other, to deliver their insanely florid party pieces. ETO doesn’t really do all-star casts, but pretty much everyone did their best to make something out of the general nonsense: Lucy Hall as the peppery innkeeper, Luci Briginshaw, charmingly ditzy as a fashionista Countess, and Grant Doyle (who never seems to bring anything less than his A game) laying down velvet-voiced drollery by the yard as the Barone di Trombonok.

Susanna Hurrell, meanwhile, as the poetess Corinna, was the one character who seemed to exist in more than two dimensions: singing with unforced poise and moving with a self-possession that made the whole show seem to pause and reorient itself around her appearances. Hurrell also got to deliver the final, incongruous twist: succumbing to despair in the celebratory final scene before taking her place in a (literal) gilded cage. This was pure invention by Ceschi: a comment, perhaps, on the tragedy of artists forced to flatter monarchs? Wealthy and famous, Rossini retired four years later at the age of 37 and spent three decades throwing dinner parties. His signature dish involved macaroni in a truffle and champagne sauce. It must have been hell.

One consistent strength of the evening was the playing of the period-instrument Old Street Band under Jonathan Peter Kenny – the whirling, woody flute and gamey cello continuo would surely have appealed to Rossini’s epicurean sensibilities. Along with the same basic set (artfully redressed), the Band also appears in ETO’s current staging of Handel’s Giulio Cesare, conducted with buoyant, untiring agility by Sergey Rybin. Hurrell is centre stage here, too: playing Cleopatra with a stately grace and a voice (alternately plangent and proud) that’s disarmingly seductive. The costumes (Cordelia Chisholm is the designer) are from Handel’s own period and director James Conway arranges his characters like figures in a Gainsborough or a Zoffany.

Somehow, though, it’s anything but stiff. Francis Gush (a vigorous Cesare), Carolyn Dobbin (Cornelia) and Alexander Chance (suitably lascivious as Tolomeo) each seemed to play against the formality, with gestures, expression and singing all taking on a naturalness that just seemed to well up and overflow, with Margo Arsane (Sesto) in particular finding a spontaneity that was powerfully affecting. If you’d told me beforehand that I would be more moved, gripped and (honestly) entertained by Handel than by Rossini, I’d have laughed. Bearing in mind the constraints under which ETO operates, I can’t imagine a more effective Giulio Cesare.

In Poole, violinist Stefan Jackiw joined the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra under its chief conductor Kirill Karabits to play the UK première of Reinhold Glière’s Violin Concerto. Glière left it unfinished at his death in 1956, and the Ukrainian composer Boris Lyatoshinsky extended the remaining fragments into a 20-minute single-movement work that sounds a bit like the Glazunov Violin Concerto if someone had ripped out all the tunes and replaced them with chipboard.

Jackiw played it with a ripe, Slavonic tone and heroic commitment (his bow disintegrated halfway through; coolly and quickly he swapped it with the leader’s and played on with barely a bar’s interruption). The point is that we got to hear it, and that Karabits (who leaves Bournemouth at the end of next season) feels able to take his orchestra and audience down such monumentally unfashionable byways. Karabits and the BSO move together effortlessly; their sound builds upwards from deep, firm foundations. People who don’t go to many concerts sometimes gripe that all modern orchestras sound the same. They should get down to Dorset, and educate themselves.