A double dilemma

It is a truth universally acknowledged that operatic double-bills are box-office poison.

Opera North's prickly Eight Little Greats deals with the problem by presenting four double-bills, but allowing audiences to come to only one opera, if that is all they want or are prepared to pay for.

In the process, the company makes some unlikely but telling juxtapositions. Rachmaninov's Francesca da Rimini (1906) and Kurt Weill's Seven Deadly Sins (1933) both show us Hell, but one is romanticised, the other clear-eyed and unsentimental. Both are directed with typically full-on theatricality by David Pountney, in sets by Johan Engels.

Rachmaninov described Francesca as an "opera in two tableaux with prologue and epilogue", which suggests that not much happens.

After Virgil shows Dante round Hell, the first tableau reveals Malatesta worrying about leaving his wife Francesca while he goes to war, while in the second his dashing brother Paolo indeed dallies with Francesca. After Malatesta kills the guilty couple, we are whisked back to Hell. Curtain.

Despite the truncated narrative, Rachmaninov's music, carefully paced by Martin André, achieves a sombre, darkly Italianate quality, and the vocal lines are strong, but neither Nina Pavlowski's Francesca nor Jeffrey Lloyd-Roberts's Paolo manages to make them count.

By contrast, Jonathan Summers's reptilian Malatesta, every syllable rank with bile, fills the stage, while the choral singing (often wordless) is spine-chilling.

Pountney's production has ideas aplenty, not all of them necessarily revealing or relevant. On the other hand, his take on Weill and Brecht's The Seven Deadly Sins makes everything abundantly clear, sometimes too literally.

Anna leaves her family in Louisiana and travels the United States to earn money to send home; all she gets is degradation. The piece is not opera, but sung ballet, and Anna comes in two forms: Anna I a coldly calculating singer, Anna II an impetuous dancer.

Pountney's staging updates this most cutting of all Weill/Brecht collaborations to somewhere closer to the present, enacting the two Annas' humiliations as a cartoon-like boxing match.

Many moments match the savagery of the piece, others are merely gratuitous, but Rebecca Caine's Anna I makes every word of Michael Feingold's translation count, while Beate Vollack's Anna II throws her whole body into her own brutal choreography.

The orchestral playing under James Holmes might be more sardonic, but it has ample zest. Whatever the problems of the production, this truly original masterpiece still packs a mighty punch.