Has there ever been a better time to be a lover of Baroque opera?

Time was when early music was a 6 p.m. concert, Baroque began with Bach and ended with Corelli’s Christmas Concerto, and speeds were so portentously slow that you’d have to start the B Minor Mass shortly after lunch in order to make it home in time for bed.

Those dark days — caught between Baroque and a hard place — are over now. Period ensembles have never been better or more numerous, Handel and Monteverdi are a staple of operatic programming, and even Vivaldi, Cavalli, Cesti and Steffani are making their mark. Baroque is back, and this time it’s here to stay.

One of the biggest success stories of recent years is the Globe’s new indoor theatre. Opened just last year, it’s already hard to remember musical life before the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse. Seating just 340, its meticulously recreated 17th-century interior is the perfect frame for period operas intended to place their performers in knee-groping, beard-stroking proximity to their audience. Crucially, it’s the space that has finally solved the problem of early opera for the Royal Opera, allowing the company to tackle a whole new repertoire with a success its own unwieldy house would never allow.

You couldn’t imagine a greater contrast than that between the Royal Opera’s in-house 2008 La Calisto (distant, scratchy, ill at ease) and the giddy, romping delight of its debut Wanamaker production, a staging of Cavalli’s L’Ormindo. If the follow-up show — Rossi’s Orpheus — lacks the musical quality of Cavalli, it makes up for it in the determined charm and inexhaustible energy of its performance. Keith Warner’s production (with a little help from Christopher Cowell’s knowing English translation) swaps Italy for Caroline England in a tragicomedy whose deliberate anachronisms chafe with a friction as delicious as Euridice’s comic death scene.