OPERA is an acquired taste and that is probably inevitable.

Whereas nursery rhymes offer an easy entree into pop – and thereafter rock and all its genres and sub genres – no one gets Shostakovich blasted over their cradle.

Opera has an ancient history – well, compared with Lady Gaga – and there are all those foreign languages to worry about (although Lady G’s robotic Poker Face strained my powers of comprehension).

It isn’t ubiquitous, at least when there’s no major European football tournament on the telly, because it makes for poor background music. Divas don’t do background.

So opera demands an effort and not everyone gets it. I confess I didn’t get it until I stopped worrying about having to get it.

I remember the moment – maybe 20 years ago at the Theatre Royal: an Oriental lady playing an English queen and singing, probably in Italian, against the background of a timber-panelled Tudor interior.

I didn’t understand it, but I got it – smack in the solar plexus, a fast-flowing river of vocal emotion. I didn’t worry about the plot but visually and aurally it came together.

Now, having got it, I like my opera weird and wonderful. Fond memories I have of the Opera North production of a tale of a mermaid on an iceberg. Can’t remember the fishy lady’s name or the title but it was madly glorious and gloriously mad.

Opera North are back tonight with three productions. I worry about them all being sung in English because, rather like Lady Gaga fans, the story I can do without. The passion’s the thing.

But if you want to get into opera, you will get it served up in cordon bleu style by Opera North. Tonight’s first course (repeated Friday) is Mozart’s early offering The Abduction from the Seraglio. It’s the one the Austrian Emperor Joseph II – in the film Amadeus – dismissed as having “too many notes”. Just see it as value for money.

It’s a brand new production and ironic it should be sung in English because it was originally commissioned to be in German to break the Italian stranglehold on the operatic libretto.

On Wednesday and Saturday comes Don Carlos, a much praised production of Verdi’s work, and on Thursday – one performance only – is Paradise Moscow, a musical comedy by Shostakovich, a man who didn’t have a lot to laugh about. The same production was here back in 2001.

For a ticket for any of these call 08448 112121. DW