I sometimes wonder why the operas of André Messager aren’t more popular in the English-speaking world. Then I watch one, and remember why. Don’t get me wrong: I adore them, and any chance to see one staged is to be savoured like a vintage Sauternes. But consider the basic plot of Fortunio (1907). The kindly old notary Maître André is married to the beautiful Jacqueline, who is sleeping with Captain Clavaroche and needs a decoy suitor to keep her doting husband in the dark. Her husband’s new clerk Fortunio is fresh from the country and what’s more, he’s utterly smitten with Jacqueline. Perfect!

To the Anglo-Saxon mind, it’s a set-up for a bawdy farce or a messy tragedy. But this is France: c’est ça la vie, c’est ça l’amour. For Messager’s librettists, Jacqueline’s betrayal of her husband – to say nothing of the kittenish way she toys with Fortunio’s emotions – isn’t so much a non-issue as a simple, delightful fact of life. Messager unfolds this comedy of guilty pleasures and innocent longing in music of such open-hearted tenderness and warmth that it’s impossible not to be seduced. The orchestration, meanwhile, simply melts on the palate.

The orchestral playing is a particular delight of this 2019 performance from Paris’s Opéra-Comique – already available in other formats but now downloadable (for rental at £4.49 or purchase at £9.99) via Amazon Prime Video. It hadn’t previously occurred to me to look for opera on Amazon Prime, but in fact there’s a small but eclectic selection available, mostly drawing on the Naxos catalogue. Denis Podalydès’s attractive Edwardian-era staging has costumes by Christian Lacroix, no less, though (unlike his more recent efforts with Offenbach’s La vie parisienne) they’re entirely appropriate to the period.

Podalydès’s one major innovation is to move the action to the winter – undercutting any incipient sentimentality with a sense of lengthening shadows, though it makes a nonsense of the libretto’s numerous references to spring flowers. Jean-Sébastien Bou is more genial than bombastic as Clavaroche, Franck Leguérinel (Maître André) is avuncular and as Jacqueline, Anne-Catherine Gillet is by turns sensuous, lyrical and sparkling, singing with a lovely inner glow. As Fortunio, Cyrille Dubois is a wholly convincing milksop in the earlier scenes, but there’s always a quiver of passion in his lilting, narrow-bore Gallic tenor and by the end he’s shooting for the stars. It’s a genuinely touching performance.

Through it all, there’s the buoyant, endlessly lyrical conducting of Louis Langrée and – to seal the deal – period-instrument playing of quite ravishing transparency and style from the Orchestre des Champs-Elysées. String textures are silvery millefeuilles; the horns blush and the woodwinds caress the ears. What sounded earthbound in the only complete recording of Fortunio (Gardiner’s 1988 Lyon set – Erato, 8/88) becomes vibrant and responsive here. I still don’t know why we aren’t recording operettas with period instruments on this side of the Channel. Perhaps you genuinely have to believe that the art of pleasure – of giving delight – deserves the utmost seriousness and skill. Perhaps – like so much about this enchanting opera – you simply have to be French.

If you’ve ever been to the Wexford Festival, however, you’ll know that there’s no more enjoyable place to tick off the rarities on your operatic bucket list. You’ll also know that unless you already live in south-east Ireland, it takes a bit of getting to. I was particularly looking forward to this October’s Wexford staging of Donizetti’s Le convenienze ed inconvenienze teatrali, but a delayed flight tipped us out into the Dublin rush hour gridlock, and that put paid to that. Inevitably, the first thing I heard as I settled down in Simon’s Bar with a consolatory pint of Yellowbelly a good hour after curtain-up was that I’d just missed the hit of the festival.

OperaVision to the rescue! This free opera platform had the show online almost before the festival was over. Perhaps inevitably in the circumstances, the video direction is rough and ready, with a limited selection of camera angles and boxy, as-live sound. But what is very clear is the energy and comic invention that the director, Orpha Phelan, has invested in Donizetti’s backstage comedy. A cash-strapped touring opera company is rehearsing Romulus e Ersilia, a clunker of an opera seria (and you’d better believe that Donizetti knew what he was mocking). There’s a diva-ish prima donna, her upwardly mobile co-star, a fretting librettist and a nice-but-dim German tenor. The theatre management is having a collective nervous breakdown – and that’s before the arrival of the seconda donna’s mother Donna Agata, played at Wexford by the baritone Paolo Bordogna.

You read right – Donna Agata is played by a deep-voiced man in drag. That’s what Donizetti specified, and that’s what we get here. By all accounts the festival’s director, Rosetta Cucchi, had been waiting for some time to cast Bordogna in this pantomime-dame role, and it pays off: Bordogna erupts into the show like a human tsunami, swinging effortlessly from genuinely formidable singing to the broadest of character comedy. He’s the mother of all stage mothers; a bel canto Mama Rose, and with his first, showstopping entry a light but fizzy ensemble comedy effectively becomes a one-man (or woman) musical comedy routine. Few of the other characters can compete, though the prima donna (sparkily sung by Sharleen Joynt) gives nearly as good as she gets.

Phelan goes all-in on farce, and her updated staging allows for a riot of theatrical in-jokes ranging from a comically misfiring ballet to a running gag about The Sound of Music and – incredibly – a climactic performance by Joynt of Bernstein’s ‘Glitter and be gay’. Shoehorned into Act 2, it brings the house down: tough luck, Donizetti. There’s plenty to enjoy, musically – Danila Grassi conducts, and the fortepiano continuo is particularly enterprising – but if you’ve ever encountered that other Irish comic creation Mrs Brown’s Boys you’ll know that a little cross-dressing comedy goes a very long way. The Wexford audience, in fairness, are in stitches throughout; and if I’d managed to get to both the pub and the opera, possibly I would have been, too.

To finish, two concerts from Prague, both free to view on ARTE. Fans of Jonas Kaufmann’s 2021 Christmas album will be equally astonished by a film music gala, The Sound of Movies, from the Smetana Hall. I thoroughly enjoyed hearing John Williams’s Superman rendered by the Czech National Symphony Orchestra under Jochen Rieder; those brass fanfares not so much soaring as striding, with a dark Vyšehrad majesty.

Kaufmann’s song choices skew towards the 1960s and 1970s – Love Story, The Deer Hunter, Strangers in the Night – and while his American-accented English is certainly passable, we do get to hear a lot of his faintly unsettling, vibrato-light head-voice: one of the weirder sounds in contemporary crossover. Briefly – blessedly – he drops back into his natural milieu for that glorious old Tauber-lied, ‘Ich küsse Ihre Hand, Madame’; and while it lasts, you could forgive him anything.

Across town at the Rudolfinum, Petr Popelka and the Czech Philharmonic have weightier matters in hand in November 2024’s Velvet Revolution Concert. The hall is decked with flowers and the concert opens with a fizzing, bustling account of Smetana’s Two Widows Overture, delivered with such headlong verve that at one point the audience starts applauding mid-piece. The evening finishes with 13 brass players walking out in front of the organ pipes to launch Janá∂ek’s Sinfonietta, and I’ve rarely heard a performance that combines such a seismic sense of purpose with quite so much bristling, earthy vitality. Popelka is a new name to me, and I’m wholly persuaded.

But the heart of the concert – and worth the price of admission in its own right – is a pair of under-played Czech concertos. Josef Špaček is the soloist in Suk’s magnificent G minor Fantasy for violin and orchestra, playing with an eloquent, throaty tone, and flashing brilliance in the work’s more scherzo-like episodes. The woodwind players echo and respond to his phrasing. Then viola player Antoine Tamestit performs Martinů’s Rhapsody-Concerto – or rather, he collaborates with Popelka in a reading of sombre, noble lyricism and (towards the end) heart-melting tenderness. It really is magnificent, and Tamestit and Špaček celebrate their achievement with a joint encore: a bravura performance of Martin≤’s Three Madrigals. Don’t you wish you could have been there? Now you can.

The events

Messager Fortunio

Opéra-Comique / Langrée amazon.co.uk

Donizetti Le convenienze ed inconvenienze teatrali

Wexford Fest / Grassi operavision.eu

The Sound of Movies

Jonas Kaufmann arte.tv

Velvet Revolution Concert

Czech PO / Popelka arte.tv