Opera reviews: Cavalleria Rusticana and Pagliacci at the Royal Opera House

The one act dramas, familiarly known as “Cav and Pag”, were written within a few years of each other towards the end of the 19th century. They answered a need for opera to be realistic, and often violent, in its depictions of everyday life. 

Both operas deal with the tragic results of sexual jealousy. Michelietto links the pair even more closely by setting them in the same south Italian village. Characters that play central parts in one opera are glimpsed in passing in the other.

You might query the high rate of homicide in one village in the space of 24 hours, but the device does give more depth to the characters’ backgrounds. 

Michelietto updates Cavalleria Rusticana to the 1980s, and begins with a frozen tableau of a silent crowd gathered around a dead man, while a grey-haired old woman sobs her heart out. Thus the opera that follows becomes a back story to the tragedy at the start.

Paolo Fantin’s detailed set of the bakery owned by Mamma Lucia revolves to reveal an interior where kneaded dough is shoved into ovens. Mamma Lucia’s son Turiddu is secretly having an affair with Alfio’s wife Lola. Turiddu has jilted his girlfriend Santuzza, who now bewails her lost honour. 

It’s only a matter of time before the aggrieved Santuzza spills the beans to Dimitri Platanias’s stocky, aggressive Alfio, and sets off the revenge.

Eva-Maria Westbroek is supremely moving as Santuzza, whose clumsy attempts to hold onto her errant lover contrast with Martina Belli’s blithe siren Lola. Latvian tenor Aleksandrs Antonenko sings the role of Turiddu forcefully and Platanias is an explosive Alfio.

In the small but important role of Mamma Lucia, Elena Zilio tugs the heartstrings as the grieving mother.

Antonenko and Platanias also take the leading roles in Pagliacci, Leoncavallo’s opera about travelling players, which has a “play within a play” denouement. Fantin’s set of village community hall revolves to reveal backstage where much of the drama is played out. 

Carmen Giannattasio’s Nedda, whom we briefly saw distributing play leaflets in the previous opera and flirting with Dionysios Sourbis’s young baker Silvio, is unhappily married to the jealous Canio (Antonenko), leader of the acting troupe, and is sexually harassed by the actor Tonio (Platanias).