Cavalleria Rusticana and Pagliacci review: Any opera fan should see Covent Garden’s heavenly Christmas offering

This double bill of earthy Italian realism at the Royal Opera House is the most brilliant show in town by a mile

‘Cavalleria rusticana' is a total masterpiece of staging (Marc Brenner)

Covent Garden’s Christmas offering is everyone’s favourite double bill, even though these twin peaks of verismo – earthy Italian realism – were not designed to be yoked together. But Damiano Michieletto’s production of Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana with Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci – universally known as “Cav and Pag” – finds an easy congruence between them.

Both are set in dirt-poor south Italian villages; the adulterer in Cavalleria dies in a duel at the hand of the man he has wronged, while the adulterous couple in Pagliacci are knifed to death when their play-within-a-play turns real.

The long orchestral introduction in Cavalleria allows Michieletto plenty of time to establish the reality of his Sicilian village, its inhabitants, and its endemic curse of violence. A motionless crowd stands around a murdered man while his mother grieves over him, then Paolo Fantin’s handsome set, with a fully functioning bakery at its heart, starts to slowly revolve, and the first of these two tales of love, sex, jealousy and revenge is set in motion.