On Friday night my wife and I attended Lyric Opera’s productions of Mascagni’s 1888 one-act opera Cavalleria Rusticana and Leoncavallo’s 1890 one-act opera Pagliacci. The two one-acts are routinely paired and referred to as “Cav/Pag”. At 1:10 and 1:15 respectively, the timing is reasonable and together these two short operas form the very definition of the Italian verismo style of opera.
In verismo the main characters aren’t heroes or kings but ordinary people and the problems they face are generally sexual, romantic, violent, or all three.
I have always thought that Cavalleria’s music was magnificent but its libretto is troubling, even flawed. Nearly all of the significant action—Turiddu’s love for Lola, his going into the army, Lola’s marriage in his absence to Alfio, Turiddu’s marriage proposal to Santuzza, his resuming his affair with the now-married Lola, and the duel with Alfio in which he is killed—take place offstage. Nonetheless, the opera is full of action including Santuzza’s appeal to Turiddu’s mother, an Easter procession, Alfio’s challenge to Turiddu, and Turiddu’s farewell to his mother. There’s enough emotionally-charged action for a full-length opera. Hearing about it rather than having it performed for us is not dramatically satisfying.
Pagliacci on the other hand is nearly perfect. All of the action takes place on stage and in real-time. When coupled with Leoncavallo’s stunning music, particularly Tonio’s introduction in front of the curtain turning the classical tradition on its head by advising the audience that what they are about to see are real people and Canio’s famous Vesti la giubba (“put on the costume”).
I found all of the performances in both works very good with no particular standouts. The orchestra was fantastic—a great improvement over the performance of Medea we heard a few weeks ago.
When my wife and I arrived at our seats tape to the seat was a card from Lyric Opera, thanking us for having been subscribers and contributors for 40 years now. Prior to that I had been a subscriber (and contributor) on my own for six years.
Chicago Tribune
I found this observation by the reviewer insightful:
Lyric musical director Enrique Mazzolaa didn’t exactly make the Lyric Orchestra swing Saturday night, mi dispeace, no, but he certainly pushed for a lush, enveloping volume, an accessibly immersive melodic experience that influenced the scores of Andrew Lloyd Webber, John Williams, and even the Scottish composer John Lunn, who wrote the music for “Downton Abbey”.
Mascagni’s lush music was proto-Hollywood scoring and the libretto by Giovanni Targioni–Tozzetti and Gujido Menascii involving love and betrayal in a Calabrian village was the prototype of the verismo genre, operas about ordinary folks that emerged as the European theater was also discovering the power of domestic realism.
Chicago Classical Review
Lawrence Johnson writes:
Lyric Opera has seen few house bows in recent years to match the sensational company debut by SeokJong Baek as Turiddu Saturday night. The young Korean tenor is the real thing, blessed with a big Italianate voice, ample squillo, intelligence and taste. From the yearning ardor of his offstage Siciliana that opens the opera, Baek was terrific across the board, impassioned in his confrontation with Santuzza, delivering a jaunty Brindisi, and conveying stark remorse and impending doom in his final aria. It was a genuine thrill to hear a voice of this quality cutting loose in Mascagni’s soaring music. The young singer also has dramatic chops, and Baek conveyed the persona of the impulsive, self-pitying Turiddu whose affair with another man’s wife leads to his sad fate.
As the rejected Santuzza, Yulia Matochkina was nearly as fine vocally. The Russian mezzo-soprano has an attractive, flexible and lustrous voice with enough reserves of power for this role. She sang an affecting “Voi lo sapete,” soared over the chorus’s Easter hymn (“Regina coeli”) and brought fervent desperation to her scene with Baek’s Turiddu.
Dramatically, Matochkina proved less inspired. The hectoring Santuzza is a tough role to carry off, but the mezzo’s melodramatic gestures and histrionics were over the top even for this emotionally unhinged character, for which revival director Peter McClintock must take some blame.
Quinn Kelsey is the only cast member to appear on both ends of Saturday’s double bill. With his suit and walking stick, Kelsey’s Alfio was more a bourgeois nouveau-riche owner of a successful trucking firm, than the usual T-shirt-clad ruffian who drives a horse cart.
Despite his mobster-like social promotion, Kelsey’s Alfio is clearly still someone you don’t want to mess with. Singing fluently with his dark, oakey tone, the baritone delivered a spirited account of his aria and conveyed the lurking violence beneath the character’s respectable exterior in his duet with Santuzza.
There has been no review from the Sun-Times as yet.
