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Pietro Mascagni: Cavalleria rusticana

–  Uwe Friedrich | October 28, 2022

The archaic world of cavalleria rusticana, the Sicilian “peasant honour”, must have struck the audience as exotic when it premiered in Rome in 1890. The men are testosterone-driven alphas, the women torn between oversized emotions.

Here the conductor Riccardo Muti is in his element, because he manages with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra to regulate the powerful sound stream and at the same time to let it flow in a relatively broad and exciting way. Already with the Siciliana at the beginning it becomes clear that Muti, with his typical mixture of excellent knowledge of the score and orchestral control with freedom and support for his first-class ensemble of singers, is the ideal man for the jealousy drama.

The tenor Piero Pretti brings penetrating power and tenderness to the naïve farm boy Turridu, letting his voice harden at times, then soften again. Sasha Cooke is a convincingly frivolous Lola who only realizes what’s going on around her far too late, and Ronnita Miller darkly plays the understanding Lucia. Luca Salsi might make the terrifying Alfio a little too comfortable, but the untamable anger about his lost honor continues to simmer beneath the surface.

One event, however, is Anita Rachvelishvili as Santuzza. Revengefulness and love, disappointment, pain and despair make her immediately empathetic. One has to look far back to the great names of legendary mezzo-sopranos to find an appropriate comparison for this outstanding artist. Technically speaking, she seems to know no problems, no limits to what can be performed with her voice. Her voice floats effortlessly over the Easter songs of the perfectly prepared choir, later she brings an immediately effective melancholy to her desperate pleas that Turridu should not go to Lola. How Rachvelishvili manages to incorporate countless artistic details into the large arc is admirable. This is how the psychogram of a torn woman is created.

The other soloists are grouped around this power center of the concert performance in 2020 and unite to form an ensemble that makes much more out of the verismo shocker than the precisely calculated effects of this perfectly constructed one-act play. Whether a re-recording of this popular work was really necessary is debatable, but the qualities of this concert
recording are beyond question.

Uwe Friedrich, Oper, October 28, 2022