The gruesome twosome of 19th-century Italian opera, Mascagni’s Cavalleria rusticana and Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci, have long been absent as a pairing from London’s main operatic stages — Antonio Pappano imported Zeffirelli’s lavish Los Angeles production as a vehicle for Placido Domingo in 2003 — so the new productions that opened English National Opera’s 2008-09 season provided an ideal opportunity to reassess their place in the modern repertoire.

Cav & Pag, as they are popularly abbreviated, once ranked almost as highly as Puccini’s big four (Bohème, Butterfly, Tosca, Turandot) and Verdi’s trio of mid-period masterpieces (Rigoletto, Trovatore, Traviata) in the affections of opera lovers. The past 20 or so years, however, have seen them fall from favour, a reflection, possibly, of the fashion for productions that challenge audiences’ expectations of verismo — the “earthy realism” style of the post-Verdian “new school” of Italian composers. Cavalleria rusticana (Rustic Chivalry) was the 26-year-old Mascagni’s sensational response to Bizet’s Carmen. Its premiere in 1890 ushered in a taste for lurid melodramas set among ordinary working people. Pagliacci (Clowns), Puccini’s Il Tabarro (The Cloak) and La Fanciulla del West (The Girl of the Golden West) are the most successful operas influenced by Mascagni’s verismo blueprint, but none of them quite matches Cavalleria for its visceral assault.

In an interview prior to last weekend’s opening night, the director, Richard Jones, admitted that Cav has the superior score, while Pag is the more interesting of the two works dramatically. That is certainly how they emerge at the Coliseum in his provocative and compelling stagings. It is typical of Jones’s work that his Cav & Pag look nothing like any productions previously seen in this country. Indeed, they are essentially “dislocations”, in new English adaptations by Sean O’Brien (Cav) and Lee “Billy Elliot” Hall (Pag), although Cav respects, up to a point, the original setting.

Jones’s designer, Ultz, offers a down-at-heel, grim-down-south take on a Sicilian village: the action unfolds in a grubby village hall that looks as if it has been recycled from ENO’s abandoned Ring cycle, the only hint of rusticity a pair of dead rabbits suspended from the ceiling of the kitchen.

Hatchet-faced widows and delinquent youths assemble in this grungy interior, and there is no hint of the square dominated by the church to which the villagers process for their Easter celebrations. (The hanging bunnies are the only evidence of the paschal holiday.)

It looks drab, but Mascagni’s tale of illicit seduction, betrayed love, adultery and revenge is the more harrowing for want of picturesque detail. Dishonoured and probably pregnant, Jane Dutton’s Santuzza is a dowdy virago, pursuing Peter Auty’s feckless Turiddu with her curses and avenging fury. With her bright, penetrating mezzo, the American makes a stronger impression in this borderline soprano role than she did as Amneris in Verdi’s Aida last season, while Auty continues to grow into the lyric-romantic repertoire with the easy ping of his plangent tenor. Less compelling are Roland Wood’s overparted, dry-voiced Alfio and Fiona Murphy’s glamorous, pale-toned Lola.

Pagliacci is a still more radical departure from convention. Hall’s script not only moves the action from rural Italy to the north of England, circa 1970, but changes the names of the characters. Canio becomes Kenny “Mr Paxo” Evans, Tonio Tony O’Sullivan and Nedda Nelly Scrimshaw — a troupe of passé television comics doing the rounds of a provincial theatre circuit in a tacky bedroom farce. Ultz’s budget extends extravagantly to three set changes, of which the theatre exterior in the opening scene is the most spectacular and the interior for the finale the cleverest: an ingenious coup de théâtre in which the auditorium and stage are split so we can see the reaction of the stage audience to drama unfolding on stage. Jones’s manipulation of the action shows the parents in the audience leading children and grannies out of the theatre as the “comedy” turns sour and f-words start flying. This is a dazzling example of Jones’s ability to provoke a Janus-faced response from his real audience: laughter and horror at the same time. I can’t think of any other director in opera with this unusual gift.

The Pag cast is a mixed bag, too. Geraint Dodd looks the part of the ageing Kenny, but his unremarkable voice is merely adequate for one of Italian opera’s great tenor roles. Christopher Purves’s leering, spivvy Tony has more imposing vocal material, but the high notes of the famous prologue take him out of his comfort zone. Mary Plazas’s captivating, radiantly sung Nelly delights in the trilly birdsong of her Ballatella. Chorus and orchestra sing and play their hearts out for Edward Gardner, who brings a fresh pair of ears to these well-worn old potboilers. The company sounds raring to go for the new season.

Pagliacci is essentially the plot of Shakespeare’s Othello transplanted, so it should have been fascinating to see Otello, Verdi’s great operatic adaptation of the Bard’s tragedy, at the Wales Millennium Centre, in Cardiff, the night before the ENO opening. This was the first production by the internationally acclaimed Scottish director Paul Curran for one of the leading British companies, Welsh National Opera, and his chance to show his worth to the UK opera establishment. Alas, he blew it. Ultra-traditional and gaudily vulgar in the big choral entrance of the Venetian ambassador and his entourage, it looked largely devoid of ideas.

The designer, Paul Edwards, undermines the plot by dressing Amanda Roocroft’s Desdemona in a series of tawdry wigs and costumes as a vampy temptress, and Curran fails to ignite volcanic jealousy in Dennis O’Neill’s super-musical but small-scale Otello. David Kempster’s incisive Iago threatens to steal the show, but even he remains one-dimensional on Curran’s watch. In compensation, there are thrills and spills from the pit and the fabulous WNO Chorus under Carlo Rizzi, who blazes through the score with Italian temperament and revels in its exquisite detail.

In my review of the Royal Opera’s La Fanciulla del West last week, I mistakenly referred to sets designed by "the late Kenneth Adam". Mr Adam is very much alive and I apologise to him for the error

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