Rachmaninov's three one-act operas have become the subject of controversy of late. Once looked upon as unwieldy experiments in a genre for which he was never suited, they have recently been championed as pithy masterpieces, admirable in their structural conciseness and psychological perception. The Chelsea Opera Group has joined the debate by performing two of them, The Miserly Knight and Francesca da Rimini, first heard together in 1906.

The Miserly Knight portrays an aristocratic world locked in a conflict over cash, as an avaricious Baron alienates his son Albert by withholding funds. The tone is bitterly ironic. The Baron is a monster, Albert a nerd whose rant about the iniquities of poverty derives from the fact that he can't afford fancy new clothes. The score is opulent in the extreme, and disturbingly suggests that greed is erotic. It is also alarmingly anti-Semitic. Linking the two men is a Jewish usurer who doles out poison along with gold, demanding that Albert murder his father so that he can rake in a share of the estate for himself.

Francesca da Rimini, meanwhile, is a piece of Decadent erotica. It dramatises an episode in Dante's Inferno that relates how Francesca and her lover Paolo were killed by the lord of Rimini, Francesca's husband and Paolo's brother. The text is Baudelairean, with the lovers envisioning damnation as a glorious eternity of sadomasochistic torment. Rachmaninov follows suit, linking sex and hell with similar chromatic themes, while the wordless cries of the damned hover between orgasm and pain.

The Chelsea Opera Group did both works proud. The dominant performance came from the Ukrainian bass-baritone Vassily Savenko as the Baron and Lanciotto, Francesca's jealous husband. Justin Lavender, who doubled up as Albert and Paolo, was most at ease with the latter's lyricism. As Francesca, Susannah Glanville was flamboyantly sexy. The conductor, Felix Krieger, drove both scores hard and the playing was excellent.