What an utter joy to hear the Lyric Opera of Kansas City’s double bill of Cavalleria rusticana and Pagliacci, with Roberto Kalb in the pit. Explaining to a first-time opera-goer what she was about to see, it came to me that the two short operas are like novellas, and as such, manage to pack a great deal of pity and terror into an extremely taut framework. There was plenty of catharsis with singing in the Kauffman Center that I’ve rarely heard bettered. I’ll happily suspend all disbelief in stereotypical Sicilian village life, involving more pious rituals and crimes de passions in 24 hours than can have been altogether common, for that kind of singing any day.
Samantha Hankey was a glorious Santuzza, in vocal command from the first. With that kind of full, ardent voice, we’re always going to be on her side – Lola doesn’t stand a chance, although Christine Boddicker was suitably coquettish in manner and in voice, flouncing about town with her sycophantic ladies, except when things get dark and messy because of the very mess she has created. She decamps from such distasteful scenes. Adam Smith as Turiddu sang intensely, ardently and with remarkable dynamics. Hankey and Smith’s duet tore at us as it does at them, but it is not until we know that he knows that he is going to die that we begin to forgive him for playing the field. Gevorg Hakobyan was a superb Alfio, his baritone suggestive of the heavy-drinking swagger that allows him to dominate the villagers and not stand being cuckolded.
The performance was enhanced Jill Grove’s humane contralto as Mamma Lucia, a superbly grounding figure. I was especially moved by the dynamic between her and Santuzza, not least that subtle tiny piece of stage action at the close, when, after hearing of her son’s death and collapsing into a chair, she hesitates to embrace the kneeling, pitiful Santuzza (the woman who, after all, has also helped to bring about her son’s death), but then, in this very hesitation, she remembers the promise she had given to her son, and does. We know that this final gesture is also an embrace of the child Santuzza carries, her grandchild, and that feels just right.
No such redemption beyond the grave mitigates the still darker tragedy of Pagliacci. For Cavalleria, director Shawna Lucey had set the clifftop scene in 1890, sun-kissed buildings, tin-roofs, row of orange trees, foaming sea visible at all times, and the fine portico of the church, stage right. A colourful lithographic poster on the Trattoria portrays the figure of Pagliacci. Pagliacci is set in the same village but in 1931, where his poster has been replaced by Fascist ones; the trattoria is boarded up; no oranges brighten its wintry trees; even the great portico is half hidden by the curtain for the theatre troupe.
Everything is bleaker. Except the singing. Hakobyan was back as a gloweringly ominous Tonio. Benjamin Ruiz as Beppe and Luke Sutcliff as Silvio were both excellent. Gabriella Reyes was a vocally beauteous Nedda. And as for Diego Torre, as Canio, I found his performance extraordinary. Without anything known about his backstory, we sense that Canio is a man haunted by his demons; the discovery that his wife is going to leave him sends him over the edge. Torre went places with the role, took us places, got existential with it. “Are you a man or a clown?” The scene where theatre and real-life blend for Canio and Nedda throbbed with intensity, and when he kills her and her lover, while we flinch at the cruelty, what we feel most of all is a sense of tragedy. Pity and terror. Which brings us back to Aristotelian catharsis.
