Cavalleria rusticana/Pagliacci, Royal Opera House, review: Superb casting and choruses create triumphant evening

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The Italian director Damiano Michieletto put himself in the critical doghouse with his Covent Garden production of Guillaume Tell earlier this year, thanks to a rape scene which gave enormous offence. But his crime was a matter of tone: in an otherwise stylised production, the aggressively in-your-face naturalism of that scene was grotesquely misplaced.

Michieletto’s track-record may be studded with as many flops as hits, but a profile in the current edition of Opera magazine suggests he’s nothing if not serious: he wants to provoke thought, but positively, and his approach to the beginning of Mascagni’s Cavalleria rusticana bears this out. He takes advantage of the long orchestral introduction to establish the reality of his Calabrian village, its inhabitants, and its endemic curse of violence; a motionless crowd stands round a murdered man while his mother grieves over him, then Paolo Fantin’s handsome set – with a fully-functioning bakery at its heart – begins to slowly revolve, and this first of two tales of love, sex, jealousy, and revenge is set in motion.

The work is strongly cast, with Aleksandrs Antonenko’s forceful (if somewhat belting) Turiddu, Dimitri Platanias’s vividly-drawn Alfio, and Martina Belli’s bewitchingly-sung Lola all illumined by the voluptuous vocal glow from Eva-Maria Westbroek’s commanding Santuzza: spurned lover she may be, but her grief and fury cry to the heavens. Michieletto’s fluid direction keeps the eye alert and periodically rewarded by stunning images, most notably of an Easter miracle in which a processional statue of the Virgin comes malignly to life, casting Santuzza – excommunicated because pregnant but unwed – into outer darkness. And gradually we realise that the initial murder was in fact a flash-forward, so the whole piece has a pleasing circularity.

But that is only part of this director’s scheme: he’s not the first to contrive a dramatic connection between these works, but his method is ingenious. During an orchestral interlude in Cavalleria we see a love-tryst under a placard advertising Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci, and realise that its lovers belong in the work to follow; conversely, the grieving Santuzza appears during an interlude in Pagliacci.

And if Mascagni’s opera emerges in its full pathos and purity, Leoncavallo’s becomes the occasion for a directorial tour de force. Here Antonenko is the cuckolded Canio, and Platanias the bitterly insidious Tonio, with both giving charismatic performances; Benjamin Hulett makes a predictably sweet-toned Beppe, while Carmen Giannattasio’s ravishing singing as Nedda literally charms the birds off the trees.

The action unfolds in a very convincing school-cum-church-hall, and witty choreography keeps us constantly aware of the simultaneous realities on both sides of the little proscenium arch; as the climax approaches, these realities intermingle in the drunken Canio’s mind to the point where he can no longer tell life from art, and the onstage comedy lurches surreally into gory tragedy.

A triumphant evening, supported by superb work by adult and junior choruses, and by orchestral playing under Antonio Pappano which faithfully reflects the brilliant colouring of these verismo classics.