Opera North and the Royal Opera have added rare works from the so-called bel canto — literally, beautiful song or singing — era of Italian lyric drama. At the Grand in Leeds, Orpha Phelan directs an expectedly hard-hitting and contemporary account of Bellini’s Romeo and Juliet opera, I Capuleti e i Montecchi, while Covent Garden has imported the 2004 staging of Rossini’s remarkable “semiseria” (a comedy with serious undertones or a potential tragedy with a happy end) Matilde di Shabran from the Rossini festival in Pesaro.

Both productions field big stars in their respected contexts. In Leeds, Sarah Connolly heads the playbill as Romeo, while Matilde is a vehicle for the dashing Peruvian tenorino Juan Diego Florez: back in 1996, in an earlier Pesaro production, this was the opera that clinched his fame. He replaced an ailing colleague, famously learning the demanding title role in a week.

Both shows are great nights for singing, but Phelan takes a more audacious theatrical tilt at Bellini than Mario Martone does at Rossini. Capuleti is the earliest of Bellini’s operas to have elbowed its way into the modern repertory, and its star seems to be on the rise possibly because it is easier to find a Giulietta than a heroine for La Sonnambula or Norma, and it has a mezzo role of equal importance. The principals number only five, so it is a practical choice for Opera North.

Phelan and her designer, Leslie Travers, boldly update the action to the here and now. The Capulets and Montagues could be rival gangs anywhere — Naples, Chicago, Belfast, St Petersburg — and they are armed to the teeth; and the love story’s hinterland of feuding families is transformed into an in-yer-face foreground. In the opening scene, a female Montague “sniper” is captured by the Capulets and summarily executed — shockingly, by a gunshot fired by a small boy, egged on by the adults. Initially, this seems gratuitous, but it abruptly establishes the ruthlessness of the milieu in which Romeo and Giulietta find themselves — and the corrupting brutality of vendetta.

Later, a Juliet double (Marie Hallager Andersen) is manhandled and thrown around the stage like a puppet on a string by her own relatives when her tryst with Romeo becomes public. On the whole, I find mute-actor alter egos irritating — and a bit of an insult to the artist being “doubled” — but here the image of Giulietta dreaming of her own rejection by her family worked potently and disturbingly. I had never imagined that Bellini’s opera could be so harrowing.

Travers’s sets are disarmingly simple, an almost bare stage with a neo-Renaissance parquet floor, which fragments dramatically in Act II, as if caught in a photograph the moment a bomb has exploded underneath it. The symbolism of a fractured world is no less devastating for being obvious.

Phelan gets wonderful acting performances from her cast.

Connolly looks less boyish in an unflattering white suit than she did as Strauss’s Rosenkavalier last season, but her glorious singing would grace any stage in the world. Marie Arnet’s Giulietta makes less of the text, and her voice is on the thin side for Bellini, but she blends very well with Connolly in duets and, with the keen edge of her silver-shot soprano, she is never overwhelmed by the orchestra. Edgaras Montvidas (Tebaldo) demonstrates here that he is much more than the Mozart tenor one might initially have anticipated. His grainy timbre may not have ripened in the Italian sun, but it is a fine instrument, underpinned by a good technique. He is tall, good-looking and an appreciable actor, which helps. The conductor, Manlio Benzi, brings plenty of temperament and italianità to the orchestral playing, emphasising Bellini’s wonderful wind-writing, and the male chorus sang their collective hearts out.

Four years ago in Pesaro, Matilde di Shabran was a dazzling discovery for me. I raved almost unreservedly about the musical performance — now available on CD in a live recording — and praised Mario Martone’s production for balancing the comic and serious elements of the piece.

If I am — only slightly — less enthusiastic about the Royal Opera’s version, it is because the impact of the performance is reduced in a much larger theatre than Pesaro’s exquisite but tiny (860-seat) Teatro Rossini. On his entrance, Florez’s voice sounds thinner than I remember from 2004, but Sergio Tramonti’s open-sided set seems partly to blame. Even so, at Monday’s second performance, Florez’s famously liquid tone sounded more nasal and tightly produced than it did in last season’s La Fille du régiment. Even if he strikes attitudes rather than acts — in a wafer-thin plot, the bellicose, woman-hating Corradino takes more than three hours to have his “ironheart” melted by the enchanting heroine — his technical bravura remains staggering.

To my surprise, he wasn’t the star of the show. That accolade goes to the ever-improving Polish soprano Aleksandra Kurzak, a delightful Susanna in Figaro here in June, who had the audience eating out of her hand with her pearly coloratura and coquettish charm. Her show-off final aria matches that of La Cenerentola in its brilliance, and she rightly brought the house down. Of those who are new since Pesaro, Enkelejda Shkosa’s vampy Contessa d’Arco is an improvement in casting. Alfonso Antoniozzi as the tiresome Neapolitan-dialect poet, Isidoro, just gets by with desiccated bluster substituting for voice, and Vesselina Kasarova’s blowsy, uncertainly pitched Edoardo is outclassed by the natural horn player in her Act II aria. Throughout a long evening, Carlo Rizzi kept Rossini’s inventive and vivacious score on the boil.

It remains a bit of a mystery why Florez champions an opera in which he plays an unattractive character and has no important aria. Covent Garden audiences should be thrilled that he does:the work is a musical treasure-trove, and Kurzak is a dazzling new star.

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