Past Production Reviews
2Damiano Michieletto’s Olivier Award-winning productions of Cavalleria rusticana and Pagliacci were premiered in 2015 and then put on again in 2017 but not since. Here they were splendidly revived by former Jette Parker Young Artist Noa Naamat and continue to justify that Olivier! The nineteenth century was ending, and audiences turned from Wagner’s gods and heroes to embrace post-Verdian verismo with its stories that reflected real-life happenings. The birth of this movement came with the premiere of Mascagni’s Cavalleria rusticana in Rome on 17 May 1890. It was soon twinned with Leoncavallo’s 1892 Pagliacci and together they caused verismo to sweep Europe influencing many diverse art forms. New York’s Metropolitan Opera first paired the works in 1893 and they were first seen together at Covent Garden the following year except the order we are used to today was reversed. The Cav & Pag double-header soon proved as popular as the regularly performed Puccini operas or genuine Verdi masterpieces in the affections of opera lovers, though recently they have fallen somewhat out of favour. Before Michieletto’s staging of Cav & Pag they had not been performed together by the Royal Opera for more than 25 years. From around that time I have some exhilarating memories of Plácido Domingo (Turiddu/Canio), Giuseppe Giacomini (Turiddu), Jon Vickers (Canio), Pauline Tinsley and Josephine Barstow (as Santuzza) and Piero Cappuccilli (Alfio/Tonio); several sadly no longer with us. Perhaps a reassessment of the operas is overdue and what Michieletto does with them can only help.
La commedia è finita (almost). Former Prime Minister Theresa May was in the house for its Cav & Pag double bill, an evening of bitter feuds, betrayal and murder. Michael Gove reportedly left before curtain-up. It’s been a fraught few weeks in Floral Street. There have been more cast reshuffles in this Royal Opera revival than Boris Johnson’s cabinet of late: Anita Rachvelishvili out, Ermonela Jaho out, Jonas Kaufmann missing the first two performances and deciding not to sing Canio when he does get on stage. At one point, Kaufmann’s replacement in Pagliacci bowed out of the first two nights as well. It was the Alagnas who rode heroically to the rescue. Aleksandra Kurzak took on the roles of Santuzza and Nedda (thereby requiring an acting double because Damiano Michieletto has each character silently appear in the intermezzo of the other’s opera) and Roberto Alagna sang Canio. And as Turiddu in Cavalleria rusticana, we had SeokJong Baek who had already come off the subs’ bench, to excellent effect, in the recent Samson et Dalila.
