A winning extravaganza

For one moment, the live donkey, braying competitively from the wings with the hushed onstage love scene, threatened to hijack the show. But Leoncavallo's Pagliacci is Italian opera at its most tear-jerkingly authentic, based on a real court case of adultery and murder at which the composer's father was judge.

A few asinine noises-off merely added to the virtual reality of this wildly spectacular Royal Opera production, new to London but already seen in Rome, Los Angeles and Washington. With sets and staging by the veteran Italian director Franco Zeffirelli and the starriest of casts headed by Placido Domingo and Angela Gheorghiu, Pagliacci was never going to be a low-key affair.

Minimal is not in the Zeffirelli lexicon. So in addition to the hunchback (Tonio), the clown (Canio), his wife (Nedda) and her lover, some 140 others poured on stage including children, acrobats, fire-eaters, juggler, monocyclists, rollerskaters, lesbians, transvestites, a fat lady, the aforementioned show-off donkey and a dead chicken.

So elaborate was the staging, so enormous the cast that, controversially for this short work, it was presented alone instead of as the usual double-bill. It certainly gains in intensity.

But that intensity, like a mouthful of truffle, comes at a price. Domingo and Gheorghiu collect an estimated £10,000 each for 68 minutes of music, or roughly £150 a minute. Top price tickets (for 38per cent of the seats) are £160 - the price of a cappuccino a minute.

Was it worth it? For sheer theatrical brio and musical quality, it is a winner. At times, the throng is so populous that it is hard to pick out Domingo, striking in white, or Gheorghiu, at first a sequinned Las Vegas cow-girl and then transformed into a pink cream-cake Columbine, from the crowd.

But Zeffirelli is an old pro and milks every big moment. When Domingo, in superb voice as the jealous Canio, sings his show-stopping Vesti la giubba (On with the motley), the multitude had miraculously vanished, leaving him to weep alone. His top notes were pure and ringing and the audience roared approval.

Gheorghiu was glitteringly ethereal as the faithless Nedda with Dmitri Hvorostovsky in golden voice as her hapless lover Silvio. Georgian bass Lado Ataneli made a striking debut as the slippery Tonio.

Zeffirelli's three-tiered Neapolitan street scene set at times over- burdened the voices, especially when they sang from far upstage.

But the vast chorus raised the roof and the orchestra, conducted by music director Antonio Pappano in this vibrant finale to his first season at Covent Garden, played with panache.