First opera of the year, first night back in London, and the jolly old metrop was already springing surprises. A hulking pink Rolls-Royce was parked on Bow Street – a real oaf of a car, the lumpish nepo-baby of a Humvee and Lady Penelope’s Fab 1. And as we stood outside the Royal Opera House, cooling off from Act Two of La traviata, a large fox came jogging out of Broad Court and urinated against the front tyre before sauntering off in the direction of Aldwych. Pure magic. You should never take the capital for granted, just as you should never assume that a mid-season revival of a standard repertoire opera in a 32-year old staging will ever – necessarily – be routine.

It’s fascinating, really, how on some nights you can sense the trajectory of a performance from the first sounds you hear. When the conductor Antonello Manacorda began the prelude, we had no way of knowing that Ermonela Jaho’s Violetta Valéry would be quite so inward, or so intimate. But with hindsight it was all there, anticipated in those long, seamless veils of violin tone. The art, with the Traviata prelude, is avoiding bathos; negotiating the bump when the basses enter and the rhythm cranks up. Manacorda streamed straight on in the same tremulous, trance-like........

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