Heralded as one of the most ambitious productions in the company's history, Opera North's The Queen of Spades opened last Thursday in a season full of high-stake gambles: a partnership with London's Barbican, challenging works by Bellini and Handel, a continuing journey through Wagner's Ring and, next spring, a new staging of Rodgers and Hammerstein's Carousel.

Opera North has flair and steely artistic nerve. It attracts loyalty from top singers. The orchestra is on excellent form, the chorus strong – in this instance boosted by a fresh-voiced children's choir. All seemed set fair for Tchaikovsky's impassioned masterpiece based on Pushkin, with a promising cast and as a bonus, in the delicious role of the wily old Countess, Dame Josephine Barstow, who made her operatic debut in 1964 and has a long association with the company.

What vital ingredient was missing? Why did this collision of obsession, greed and death leave us unscathed? It looked handsome in Kandis Cook's designs. Even if the mustard-coloured hinged-box set had no distinguishing features, the generic period costumes compensated: drop-waisted gowns in chiffons, silks and organzas for women, with the men adorned in imperial Russian military splendour playing out their final days of idle wealth before that world collapsed forever.

In Richard Farnes's expert hands, there were plentiful musical assets, with sumptuous, detailed orchestral playing, notably from the low woodwind – essential in this score, which pulses, chokes and gurgles with a variety of blown emotion. Barstow, famous for her Elizabeth I in Gloriana, showed she can still dominate a stage. Her imperious "Stop that prattling", directed at her gossiping womenfolk, made the entire audience bristle to attention.

The problem lay in Neil Bartlett's low-voltage production. In this compact, hard-driven drama, the central characters immediately need to be as interconnected and dangerous as an electric circuit. Beyond a chaste kiss, Jeffrey Lloyd-Roberts as the card-crazed Herman and Orla Boylan as the infatuated Lisa showed no sexual frisson. They stood awkwardly, and if you didn't already know the story you might be baffled as to what their relationship was. Second cousins, maybe.

Neither was helped by unflattering costumes. Boylan looked needlessly mumsy with her neat bun and stiff dress, only really appearing the romantic heroine, hair down and dress awry, in the harrowing outburst before she commits suicide. Her voice, too, suddenly became rich and voluptuous and you wished she could begin again in this captivating mode. Lloyd-Roberts, whose usual ardent lyricism was thwarted by chest problems – assuming his coughs were not theatrical – came off no better in the wardrobe department. His jacket was buttoned so tightly to the neck he appeared constricted. When he stole into the Countess's bedroom he brought to mind Burglar Bill rather than a wild-eyed madman. Some urgent, simple unbuttoning by the costume department could work wonders. As Prince Yeletsky, William Dazeley, in his big aria, provided the best singing.

Opera North switches its language policy according to need. This needed to be in Russian but was in mawkish English. You can get away with Tchaikovsky's more conversational Eugene Onegin in translation, but with The Queen of Spades all that matters is the mood of overwhelming, destructive passion. Many Russian sounds have no equivalent in English. They soak into Tchaikovsky's musical landscape and stain it ineradicably, whereas English vowels and consonants seem to skate around hopelessly, sliding over the harmonies and never establishing contact.

Tchaikovsky once described Wagner's Der fliegende Holländer, another tale of obsession with supernatural tendencies, as "terribly noisy and boring". This is not a fair account of Tim Albery's 2009 staging, but it did bump back to Covent Garden with an identity crisis in tow and a few longueurs. This one-act, one-set Dutchman, dominated by a steep wave cum deck of a ship – imagine a recalcitrant piece of lino too big for its intended space – offers a static challenge to a work pulsating with dramatic momentum.

Egils Silins, an experienced Dutchman making his ROH debut, sang decently but had little chance to suggest character or emotion. Anja Kampe's Senta, despite some abrasive top notes, brought out the sense of fevered imagination which leads her to fall for an accursed captain condemned to sail the high seas.

The essence of The Flying Dutchman is redemption through love. Here, redemption came via the intelligent conducting of Jeffrey Tate, steering boldly through the clear shifts in tempo and mood with which this score, even in the one-act version, is riven. This approach was often at odds with the intransigence of the production. Short of tearing it all up and starting again, Tate could do little. Let's hope this marvellous conductor is signed up for a more engaging production soon.

Last weekend, and avoiding the temptation to make a lugubrious thematic connection, I attended my first and probably last Dutch Classical Music Meeting. This publicly funded showcase of musical activity, alone of its kind and with an emphasis on innovation, attracts some 200 music professionals from all over the world. But the new right-wing Dutch government has scythed a violent path through arts funding – in some cases up to 50 per cent – in a manner which makes our own cuts seem negligible. The DCMM is unlikely to survive.

This gathering offers a speedy way of sampling young Dutch ensembles and soloists – some 20 in all. The teenaged pianist brothers, Arthur and Lucas Jussen, floppy-haired blonds who look as pretty as dolls but already have a recording contract with DG and endorsement from pianists Maria João Pires and Menachen Pressler, gave a beguiling performance of Schubert's Fantasia in F minor. Two other pianists, Ralph van Raat and Hannes Minnaar, as well as Erik Bosgraaf, a bewitching recorder player – not a phrase I ever expect to write – are also names to watch.

In the conference itself, called "Reframing the classical musical experience", a young man from South Africa described his country's musical life as "in deep crisis", with talent "bleeding away" because of mass immigration, and the taint of apartheid on "Eurocentric" classical music.

Most illuminating of all was Karim Wasfi, a big, cheerful man in blazer and club tie who is conductor of the Iraqi National Symphony Orchestra. In a short conversation in a coffee break, he described to me the difficulties of reconstructing the orchestra – founded in 1948 – since the unrest of the past decade. He stressed that before the civil war, Iraq was "the most liberal and secular" of the Middle Eastern countries, encouraging the performance of western classical music. After that, problems arose. Musicians fled the country. Painstakingly, he had to encourage them back from exile. Now he has 140 players to call on, all Iraqis.

He regards his work in part as a way of building cultural bridges between Iraq and the west. They give two concerts a month. In addition to his musical duties, Wasfi has to deal with abnormal administrative tasks: reading the latest intelligence reports, checking the tight security needed for every performer and audience member, negotiating the logistics of random checkpoints so that concerts can start on time. On occasion, instruments themselves have been hijacked.

Wasfi has received frequent death threats. "I don't know why. What I am doing is not political. We have audiences. People love to come." What repertoire do they prefer? "Wagner, Bruckner, Brahms… the big stuff. But no Mahler, as yet, because we are missing some of the instruments. Perhaps someone will donate some… " Specifically he needs a bass clarinet, a cor anglais, a contra bassoon and "as much percussion as anyone can spare". This is a serious request. Can anyone help? If so, please contact Karim Wasfi via his Facebook page.