Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana and Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci, Opernhaus Zürich, 21.02.2022

While neither Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana nor Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci figure among my favorite operas, there is something about watching the combo in the theatre, something like the hardcore experience of Italian opera, two hours and a half of raw orchestration, raw feelings, exposed acuti, sirupy melody and, before you notice, you’re enjoying it. Both works used to make more sense when you had old-school Italian vocioni peeling the paints off the wall. Conductor-centric versions were an unexpected development, generally involving puzzling pieces of casting (like Joan Carlyle’s Nedda or Jessye Norman’s Santuzza), but the sad truth about performances of Cav&Pag in the last two decades is that they rarely have either great voices or great conductors. And that’s when you start to think what is the point of the whole experience.

With Cavalleria, the problem is more obvious. The score is clearly inferior to the one of Pagliacci and it depends enormously on the personality and vocal calibre of the cast. I can think of one single performance of Cavalleria with a less-than-ideal cast that proves this wrong, which is Riccardo Muti’s video from Ferrara with Waltraud Meier and José Cura. It actually spoiled the experience of watching it altogether: the level of acting is good enough for a movie and their singing is so individual and expressive that you don’t even stop to think of people like Giulietta Simionato or Mario del Monaco. And there’s Muti not trying to make it sound like Mahler but pulling all the stops with his orchestra. This evening, we had nothing like that. First, the performance took long to take off. The undernourished strings in the orchestra made it all sound like a band was on duty. There were serious problems of synchronicity between chorus and orchestra, and the cast seemed a bit off, like they had something else in their minds. We noticed the strings were there only when we reached the intermezzo, which was the spiritual beginning of this performance. After that, everybody seemed to be vibrating in a whole new level – including conductor Paolo Carignani – but still those singers were not entirely at ease with what they had to do.

The show turned around Elina Garanca’s Santuzza, what is a problem in itself. Garanca has been accused of iciness in operas like Mozart’s La Clemenza di Tito. You can only imagine that her approach to verismo is nothing close to sacro fuoco. That is not a bad thing per se, for one could notice that she has really given a great deal of thought about her Santuzza. It had many tiny, meaningful details, but it remained an effort of someone trying to be something completely foreign to her nature – including in terms of voice. On paper, it is a plausible one for the role – it is big enough, the high notes are powerful enough, the middle register is solid enough. Yet it is soft-cored for Italian repertoire, too smooth and too indistinct in terms of diction to make any sense in a work like this. She was mostly in charge, but sounded tired by the end of her duet with Turiddu, working hard for her acuti, which were more muscular than naturally projecting at that point. In terms of interpretation, she couldn’t help seeming a bit too cerebral and, if the idea was showing the character as schemy and frankly vindictive, then it worked. Marcelo Álvarez is no longer at his freshest-toned and delivered the opening song in a nasal, unappealing tone. In the duet with Santuzza, he had to lunge for his high notes, yet the voice gradually acquired his usual roundness and spontaneity. He seemed a bit uncomfortable being the object of desire of two mezzo sopranos, but once wine started to be poured, he found a congenial, Latin American “macho” vibe that carried him effortlessly to the end of the opera. George Petean’s velvety baritone does not sound Alfio-material to my ears. He sang with beautiful legato, far more than what I am used to hear in the role, and crisp diction. That said, he is too much of a nice guy to pose any threat. When he has a knife, you think he is going to carve some parmigiano reggiano rather than kill anyone. I believe this is the first time I’ve ever seen a Mamma Lucia who is also a Bach contralto, and this seems to be a good thing, for Irène Friedli offered a touching account of the part, singing with a warm, gentle tonal quality and acting with restrained intensity. Last but not least, Svetlina Stoyanova’s fruity mezzo was very well employed for the part of Lola.

It seemed that Cavalleria was the test run for Pagliacci, for the second part of the evening started off far more animatedly, even the chorus sounded more strongly and the orchestra fuller and more engaged. The lack of synchronicity was still there – but at least singers’ voices were cushioned in the sound of strings as only occasionally before that. The lightweight quality of the cast, however, was even more evident. With one exception: the velvet in George Petean’s baritone worked wonders in the prologue, even his high notes sounded firmer and richer. And he proved to be very well cast as Tonio, both in terms of singing and of acting. Maybe it is the clown costume, but he also managed to project a psychopathic impression. Bravo. Ekaterina Bakanova acted well as Nedda, yet her voice is simply to light for the part. She could muster all her resources to produce some forceful high notes, but they were in a universe apart from the rest of her voice. She survived her difficult (and not really appealing) balatella, decent trills involved. Even at his prime, Marcelo Álvarez was on the light side for the part of Canio. Now he makes do bracing for the high notes and disguising a ragged line by some acting with the voice. It all sounded a bit careful in a part that requires something usually labelled as “force of nature”. In terms of acting, however, he was fully inside his character, making us almost feel for him even when we shouldn’t. Finally, Xiaomeng Zhang was a firm- rather dark-toned Silvio.

In terms of staging, one can praise the Personenregie in Grischa Asagaroff’s 2009 staging (revived by himself), but that is pretty much it. The sets were generally ugly and very distant of what anyone would imagine of an Italian setting. More than that, in terms of concept, there is nothing to talk about. I won’t even try.