In opera, as in so much high-budget entertainment, expectation management is half the battle. With its massive Greek Revival mansion, approached through miles of rolling parkland, The Grange Festival has the grandest setting of any of the summer festivals; and that might have something to do with why the opera served up there has so often felt less than overwhelming. Possibly I’ve been unlucky in my choices at the Grange since it relaunched under the current management in 2017. But many different elements need to fall precisely into place at precisely the right time if an opera is really to catch light, and quite often, under those wide Hampshire skies, that necessary spark has been absent.

Not this time. The Grange Festival’s new production of The Queen of Spades doesn’t just ignite: it erupts. Slowly at first, it’s true: Gary McCann’s sets echo the converted orangery that houses the Grange’s theatre, and the costumes suggest that the whole thing has been updated to the 1950s, which makes no sense at all for a drama set in tsarist Russia. But ‘generic mid-20th century’ is just a reflex for opera designers these days – you screen it out and sink into the drama, which in the hands of director Paul Curran and (crucially) conductor Paul Daniel, accelerates from faintly stilted to utterly thrilling.

That you don’t feel it coming (initially, at least) is in part down to the way Tchaikovsky paces the plot: but whenever he moves up a gear, Curran slams down the pedal. The final scenes are edge-of-the-seat stuff, as the ancient Countess (Josephine Barstow) confronts her violent destiny, Liza (Anush Hovhannisyan) swings from full-blooded longing to piteous despair and the obsessed Herman (Eduard Martynyuk) descends into rasping, snarling madness as the world starts to spin – literally – about him. These three inhabit their characters down to the smallest twitch of the lips. You just knew Barstow was going to freeze time around her, and she did, but Hovhannisyan combined the vulnerability of Tchaikovsky’s other great heroine Tatyana with a ripe, headlong vocal passion. Liza is playing for even higher stakes.

Martynyuk led a quartet of Ukrainian and Russian male leads, who sounded as if they were singing for their lives. Ilya Kutyukhin, in particular, glowed with eloquence and charisma as Prince Yeletsky: he scored a rare mid-show ovation, and he deserved it. Martynyuk was unsparing on himself, singing with the same energy and sensitivity to the words even as his character devolved from Byronic charmer to hollow-eyed obsessive. Quite simply, this was a superb ensemble cast, generating electricity off each other while Daniel and the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra ramped up the emotional temperature to a point of no escape. I can still hear the wailing of the brass and the black, thunderclap onslaught of the timpani. This might be the Grange Festival’s finest achievement to date; it’s certainly the best that I’ve seen.

At Garsington, there’s a new production of Ariadne auf Naxos. Story-wise, the piece is a hot mess and some directors attempt to fix it by shoehorning a romance between the Composer – a girl playing a boy – and the showgirl Zerbinetta. Not here, though: director Bruno Ravella plays it pretty much straight, and even with the best cast in the world, a straight Ariadne is going to creak. Garsington has an exemplary cast, with Natalya Romaniw as Ariadne, Polly Leech as the Composer and Jennifer France as Zerbinetta (a role she has played in most recent UK productions of this opera). The three nymphs could have been dressed by Cecil Beaton.

They all sounded lustrous (as did tenor Young Woo Kim – a wonderfully Italianate Bacchus), and the Philharmonia Orchestra wove delicate, silken chamber music under Mark Wigglesworth. But no amount of sonic loveliness or inventive lighting (Malcolm Rippeth) can make Ariadne auf Naxos hang together unaided. ‘I didn’t understand it,’ remarked the woman just behind me on the way out, and I’m still not convinced that either Richard Strauss or his librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal could honestly have enlightened her.

As for expectation management, anyone who anticipated show-stopping vocals from Jonas Kaufmann in the Royal Opera’s revival of Massenet’s Werther will have been disappointed. That’s not where Kaufmann is coming from at this point in his career; his Werther is a man of half-tones, melancholy asides and a lieder-singer’s sensitivity to word-colour and phrasing. Dramatically speaking, that’s no bad thing, and Kaufmann’s typically stiff acting might actually be an advantage in portraying Goethe’s troubled outsider. The high-romantic lustre comes from the painterly Caspar David Friedrich-like visuals of Benoît Jacquot’s 2004-vintage staging (it still scrubs up very nicely), from Pappano’s sometimes headstrong conducting and above all from Aigul Akhmetshina as Charlotte: sweet-toned, expressive and (when necessary) richly passionate. She’s the real heart of this Werther, and that’s no bad thing, either.