Pagliacci/Cavalleria Rusticana

This pairing of Pagliacci and Cavalleria Rusticana in Opera North’s Little Greats season is traditional – though not in this order. Deemed the more technically sophisticated of these two pieces written at the start of the Italian verismo (‘realist’) period, Pagliacci usually brings the evening to its blood-and-thunder close.

Here, in Charles Edwards’ self-designed staging, it launches it in effective fashion, even if the concept stretches the material in ways that don’t really add up. It is set in the present, at the rehearsals of an opera, where jealous, drunken director/tenor Canio eventually stabs to death his unfaithful soprano wife and her lover the conductor.

But Leoncavallo’s opera proves strong enough to withstand such idiosyncrasies, especially given the confident commitment of vocal performances led by Peter Auty’s troubled Canio, Elin Pritchard’s vibrant Nedda, Richard Burkhard’s venomous Tonio and Phillip Rhodes’ sensitive Silvio.

For once Pag is outflanked by Cav – to use the colloquial titles opera fans invariably employ – despite Polish director Karolina Sofulak’s even greater freedom with Mascagni’s material. From late-19th-century Sicily she moves Cavalleria Rusticana to her Catholic homeland in the 1980s, when Santuzza has acquired an obsessive mania for religion and much of the love-triangle-with-extras plot is seen through the distorting mirror of her emotional and sexual fantasies.

Once again, something that shouldn’t work takes off in the most extraordinary way. Giselle Allen’s Santuzza, in particular, reaches terrifying levels of intensity, and she’s outstandingly partnered by Jonathan Stoughton’s village stud Turiddu, Phillip Rhodes’ straight-down-the-line betrayed husband Alfio, Katie Bray’s risk-taking Lola and Rosalind Plowright’s virtually omnipresent Mamma Lucia.

Conductor Tobias Ringborg draws performances from the company’s orchestral and choral forces to match those of the principals, and the two visceral operas hit you right where it hurts.