A marvellous and gripping spectacle
Cavalleria rusticana & Pagliacci Royal Opera, Covent Garden
At the forefront of today’s great operatic artists, the Latvian mezzo-soprano Elīna Garanča holds an indisputable place. If she isn’t as celebrated in Britain as she should be, that is simply because she hasn’t performed here much. But grab at any chance to hear her: she is in her prime and something exceptional, blessed with beauty, presence, actorly instinct, musicality, nous – and, above all, the God-given magnificence of voice that is opera’s ultimate selling point.
Returning to Covent Garden after an eight-year absence, she takes the role of the desperate Santuzza in Mascagni’s Cavalleria rusticana.
There’s not much for her to sing here and the music is rough, red-blooded stuff, but what a wealth of meaning she finds in its broad brushstrokes! Colouring “Voi lo sapete” with a range of emotions and infusing fierce intensity into the duet with her faithless lover Turiddu, she makes unforgettably vivid an ardent young woman destroyed by a toxic combination of shame and anger.
It was a marvellous performance, made all the more potent by the electricity coursing through her clashes with Bryan Hymel’s thrillingly vocalised Turiddu and Elena Zilio’s Mamma Lucia. The chorus was spinetingling in the Easter Hymn and, with the conductor Daniel Oren keeping the volume under control in the pit, the whole thing crackled.
Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci suffered a little in contrast. Because of another tenor’s indisposition, Hymel bravely assumed the role of Canio, too. He gave a highly charged reading, but by the last scene he was clearly running out of puff. Carmen Giannattasio repeated her nervily sensitive Nedda and, in his Covent Garden debut, Andrzej Filończyk made his mark as Silvio. The outstanding performance here, however, was that of another Covent Garden absentee – Simon Keenlyside, returning after a three-year absence due to throat illness as the scheming Tonio and happily proving that his voice remains splendidly vigorous as well as acting the vicious lecherous misfit with Dickensian relish. Oren’s conducting was finely tuned, but after the scorching Cavalleria rusticana, there was a slight feeling of anticlimax.
Rodula Gaitanou rehearsed, very effectively, this second outing for Damiano Michieletto’s 2015 production. Its premise is that both operas occur at the same time in the same community, with the personnel interwoven: thus we see Nedda and Silvio trysting in Cav and Santuzza confessing her sins in the orchestral interlude of Pag. I don’t find this illuminating, because I feel that it’s the differences between Mascagni’s superstitious Sicilian peasants and Leoncavallo’s gullible Calabrian townies that should be emphasised rather than the similarities. Another irritant is an overused revolving stage. But Michieletto allows both dramas their heart and gut, and the result is a gripping spectacle.