Last year, the Wexford Festival unveiled its magnificent little opera house to unanimous acclaim, so it was inevitable, perhaps, that this year’s programming had an after-the-lord-mayor’s-show feel to it. The artistic director, David Agler, offered a resourceful mixture of the innovative and tried and trusted: a reduced version of John Corigliano’s 1991 Metropolitan Opera extravaganza, The Ghosts of Versailles, a double bill of Chabrier with Rossini, and the festival’s 13th Donizetti opera, Maria Padilla, which revealed, yet again, that this bel canto master can invariably be relied upon to deliver a neglected near-masterpiece.

Maria Padilla, a late work premiered at La Scala in 1841, is a brilliant vehicle for a fire-snorting bel canto diva, and Wexford found one in the American soprano Barbara Quintiliani. She relished the flashes of vindictive coloratura brilliance and menacing descents into the chest register required by Donizetti for Maria, seduced by the nefariously lustful King of Castile, Don Pedro, and rejected by her father, the exiled Don Ruiz, who goes mad in his despair and humiliation. As does Maria in Donizetti’s original, when Don Pedro dumps her and marries a French princess instead. But Wexford’s director, Marco Gandini, had the not-so-brilliant idea of Queen Blanche slumping dead in her throne at the sight of the formidable Quintiliani, so that the latter could round off the evening with Rossini-Cinderella-like jollifications and a “happy end” — rather than an outburst of manic suicidal fury. Perhaps Gandini has access to an edition of the opera the synopsis writer and programme annotator were blissfully ignorant of, but I suspect this was another example of an uppity director knowing better than the author.

Even so, this was the musical highlight of a generally mediocre festival, thanks to Agler’s stylish conducting and the idiomatic, if relentless and unvaried, singing of Marco Caria (Don Pedro) and Adriano Graziani (Don Ruiz). His was the most interesting role after the prima donnas, a rare elderly part for a leading tenor in the bel canto canon. If there is any justice in the opera world, Quintiliani should be heading for superstardom, but her physical size won’t go down well with the big, HD-live-broadcasting managements, with their skinny-soprano fetishes. She has the vocal hardware, however, to become a cult figure outside the glamorous opera circuit, with her gleaming timbre, fearless leaps between the extremes of registers and apparently bottomless reserves of breath.

Another Italian, Roberto Recchia, made Wexford look amateurish and provincial in the double bill. Chabrier’s little opérette, Une éducation manquée, has a charming score, but dramatically it’s a nonstarter: a mini-Rosenkavalier for sexual beginners, devoid of interesting or sympathetic characters. As the ingénue newlyweds, Paula Murrihy (Hélène) and Kishani Jayasinghe (Gontran) sported agreeable voices, but it was hard to make out which language they were singing in. If the singers don’t engage with the text in a meaningful way, this kind of piece really doesn’t have a chance. Recchia wrecked Rossini’s first opera, the one-act farsa La cambiale di matrimonio (The Promissary Note), with a preposterous futuristic updating to “London 2049”, in which humans are for sale and sport barcodes tattooed on their foreheads. Robotic extras moved around clunky walls and platforms with diminishing returns. The performance was marginally more involving, thanks to the 18-year-old Rossini’s already nascent dramatic gifts and a cast of mostly decent Italian singers who clearly knew what they were singing about. Time, I think, for a moratorium at Wexford on Italian directors with pretensions to German régisseurs’ “conceptual theatre”.

James Robinson gave them a lesson with his impeccable staging of Corigliano’s The Ghosts of Versailles. If only the opera had been worth the effort. Its thieving-magpie eclecticism — not only Mozart and Rossini are plundered, but Barber, Bernstein and Broadway — soon palls, and the theatrical premise of the piece, in which Beaumarchais rewrites history to save Marie Antoinette from the scaffold, is clearly just historical-fantasy twaddle masquerading as profundity. It was a huge success at the Met in 1991, thanks to a spectacular staging, flouncy frocks and a stellar cast. In Wexford it merely seemed meretricious. Maria Kanyova’s touchingly acted Marie Antoinette, George von Bergen’s charismatic Beaumarchais, Laura Vlasak Nolen’s voluptuous Samira and Mark T Panuccio as the oddly named villain Bégearss (presumably pronounced beige-arse) were the standouts from a decent cast, but their talents were largely wasted on Corigliano’s empty operatic nostalgia trip.

Glyndebourne embarks on its annual tour this week (in Woking, Stoke-on-Trent, Norwich, Milton Keynes, and Plymouth to follow) after a fortnight of performances in Sussex, with a repertoire comprising Richard Jones’s 2009 production of Verdi’s Falstaff and revivals of Nicholas Hytner’s 2006 Così fan tutte and Nikolaus Lehnhoff’s 1989 staging of Janacek’s Jenufa — a Glyndebourne classic.

So far, I have only managed to catch Mozart’s sublime comedy, and it is vintage Glyndebourne. I adored Hytner’s staging when it was unveiled three summers ago, and especially his work with a young, handsome and infinitely touching quartet of lovers, but it was disappointingly revived with a less good cast in 2006. Now Ashley Dean has revitalised the action and the acting of an even younger ensemble, three of whose mem-bers — Riccardo Novaro’s wry, sardonic Don Alfonso, Lucia Cirillo’s volcanically sensual Dorabella and Jacques Imbrailo’s cockily macho Guglielmo — one would be happy to encounter at the festival.

Gillian Ramm’s delicate Fiordiligi, perhaps lacking ideally resonant low notes, is an enchantingly musical and dramatic foil to her more temperamental sister, and Simona Mihai’s gamine Despina is funny without working overtime for her laughs. Only Andrew Tortise’s breathy, falsettoish tenor lets the side down in Ferrando’s taxing solos and the big seduction duet with Fiordiligi, but even he is a lively actor and blends well in the ensembles. Hytner’s production was notable for its textual fidelity and Dean has restored its subtle ambiguity, with acting to match Paule Constable’s ravishing chiaroscuro lighting and Vicki Mortimer’s evocative period-modern sets. It looks like Così should: a sung enlightenment comedy with dark undertones. Patrick Lange’s blithe conducting and lovely playing by the orchestra set the seal on an evening of rare Mozartian enchantment. If there are available seats, book them fast.

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