Heaven knows what the implications of the financial catastrophe will be for grand opera. But I think we can assume that everything from the principal tenor's pasta portions to the scene-painter's brush budget will be scrutinised in the future. Perhaps, then, English Touring Opera has struck the right chord, in every sense, with this autumn's repertoire. Two meaty Romantic operas are presented in versions that whittle down both spectacle and music to the bare bones.

Instead of Carmen we get La tragédie de Carmen - Peter Brook's brilliant 1981 rethink of Bizet's opera. The action is condensed to 90 blood-stained minutes (blink and you miss another stabbing), and all the Spanish spectacle shorn away. Instead, Brook adds episodes, such as the appearance of Carmen's Gypsy husband, that twist the story in on itself, and on the ever-present theme of violent death. Meanwhile, Bizet's score is filleted, deconstructed and distorted in an even more disconcerting manner. It's a jolting show, but a powerful one, especially as restaged here (by Andrew Steggall) in a film-noir-meets-rough- theatre style with atmospheric silhouettes and shadows. I just wish that the music was better projected. The pit band is fine under Gareth Hancock, but neither Leah Marian Jones's Carmen nor David Curry's José match their sparky acting with fiery singing. And Nicholas Garrett has nothing like the range to sing Escamillo - even an Escamillo required to croon the Toreador's Song like Tony Bennett.

Rusalka is a more conventional show. Dvorák's Wagnerian score - a riot of diminished chords and tremolandos - is presented in Iain Farrington's version for just 13 instruments, persuasively conducted by Alex Ingram. Out goes the chorus, but otherwise Dvorák's leitmotif-saturated music, with its shimmering, otherworldly atmosphere, is preserved remarkably well.

Meanwhile, James Conway's staging transports this fey yet touching story, of a water spirit hopelessly in love with a prince, to Haiti in the early 1900s. The spells of the witch Jezibaba become voodoo magic and the tension between the naive water spirits and the arrogant humans is transformed into a clash between Haiti's poor blacks and colonial whites - a divide underlined, none too subtly, by the manacles of Paul Wills's designs.

It's not a pacy or pulsating evening, but thanks to some sincere performances - Donna Bateman's traumatised Rusalka, Fiona Kimm's cackling Jezibaba, Keel Watson's wonderfully woebegone Waterman and Richard Roberts's strongly sung Prince (including a belting top C) - it just about holds the attention. And Dvorák, a European legend transported to the New World, might have been tickled by the transposition.

Tour details: www.englishtouringopera.org.uk

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