DIRECTOR – Damiano Michieletto; REVIVAL DIRECTOR, Noa Naamat; SET DESIGNER, Paolo Fantin; COSTUME DESIGNER Carla Teti, LIGHTING DESIGNER, Alessandro Carletti; CONDUCTOR, Antonio Pappano Turridu – SeokJong Baek; Nedda and Santuzza – Aleksandra Kurzak ; Canio – Roberto Alagna; Alfio, Dimitri Platanias; Lola, Aigul Akhmetshina; Mamma Lucia. Elena Zilio; Tonio, Dimitri Platanias; Silvio, Mattia Olivieri; Beppe, Egor Zhuravskii
These are again two works I have been very snobbish about in the past and as far as I can remember I have never seen them live before . I do recall that Rita Hunter once sang Santuzza in the 70’s but I have no memory of going to the ENO to see her, I probably wouldn’t have booked this time, except that I had an evening spare in London before getting a very very early Eurostar train the following morning, and I thought it would be good to see Jonas Kaufmann in a role, plus Ermonela Jaho is a superb singing actor. As luck would have it both were indisposed and couldn’t make it, but we got some excellent replacements instead, as you’ll read below.
Coming to these two works supposedly for the first time, I quickly realised how much particularly of ‘Cav’ I already knew – umpteen recital recordings of the Easter hymn, the Intermezzo, and various big arias have just got lodged in my memory over the years. ‘Cav’, in many ways is the more striking work – it has ‘big tunes’ galore, and an action-packed and clear story, whereas I Pagliacci doesn’t have quite the same level of heightened melodic invention, and I found myself getting a bit confused as to who was who in the ‘play within a play’ sequence, and who precisely Beppe is.
The production I thought was well done. In both cases the setting is the late 1940’s in a Sicilian village and this works well – Alfio comes back from the war with a splendid 40’s car, the costumes and sentiment feels right for this period. There are attempts made to link the two works – posters are going up for I Pagliacci near Mamma Lucia’s bakery in ‘Cav’, and Mamma Lucia seems to make a re-appearance in ‘Pag’. The sets in both works are revolving realistic designs for parts of the village and this works well, particularly in ‘Pag’ so that we can alternate between the village stage and the dressing rooms. The only slightly out of the way part of the production is that it starts in the Prelude of ‘Cav’ with Turridu’s murder and then tells the story of how we got to that point.
The sheer energy of these two works requires first rate singers who can project their character well to an audience in a relatively short period of time. The standout star of both was Aleksandra Kurzak, who is at the peak of her career and can do everything she wants to do with her voice – passionate, quiet, smooth and lustrous, violent, she can do it all in a refined and totally controlled way, with little vibrato and total clarity. Her two tenor leads were quite a contrast – the Canio was Roberto Alagna (her husband) who offered a master class in style – he is in almost the twilight zone of his career and he can no longer belt out the top notes as he once could, but what he does is affecting, beautifully sung, with pointed, clear diction and representing the absolute essence of the tradition of Italian 19th century opera (he also managed to do a cartwheel at one point!). His ‘Cav’ equivalent, SeokJong Baek as Turridu, was ardent and full-on, very different in style and approach but suiting perhaps the intensity of ‘Cav’ better, just as the subtleties of ‘Pag’ are very well-matched to Alagna’s abilities to what he can now deliver so effectively. The other person singing in both operas was Dimitri Platanias as Alfio and Tonio, and he was very good at delivering menace and threat. Lola in ‘Cav’ was sung very well – a beautiful warm, rich mezzo voice – by Aigul Akhmetshina, a young Russian singer. Antionio Pappano kept the orchestra fizzing and full of energy.
Much against my better judgement ans my expectations, a really enjoyable evening…………
John's musical journey 