Opera North’s Cavalleria Rusticana was designed to be detachable: it premiered as part of the company’s 2017 Little Greats season, appearing alongside a variety of fellow one-act operas rather than just the customary Pagliacci. For this season’s outing, however, director Karolina Sofulak has coupled it only with Rachmaninoff’s Aleko, in which another insular society (this time a bohemian commune) is fractured by a love triangle turned fatal. Sofulak goes further still, explicitly linking the two operas by conceiving Aleko and Cavalleria’s Alfio as the same man, 20 years apart, and haunted – in every sense – by a crime he is doomed to repeat.
Both stagings shift the action of their operas significantly: Cavalleria Rusticana trades sun-kissed Sicily for 1970s communist Poland, and Aleko’s gypsies become the free-loving denizens of a 1990s surfers’ colony, with designs by Charles Edwards (sets) and Gabrielle Dalton (costumes) doing delectable justice to both settings. If the former, with its stripped-back aesthetic and prevailing unease, packs more of a wallop than the candy-coloured latter, the same might well be said of the operas themselves: Rachmaninoff’s episodic score can’t quite match Mascagni’s, neither for momentum nor for word-painting, richly evocative though it undoubtedly is.
