Cavalleria rusticana / Pagliacci – St George’s Hall, Liverpool

North Wales Opera Studio’s welcome return to Liverpool to perform a one-act verismo pairing became a little disjointed as director Anne Williams-King was unable to take full advantage of the venue’s performance space.  

Cavalleria rusticana and Pagliacci or, more familiarly, Cav and Pag is an archetypal one-act opera pairing, and it’s hard to imagine two more closely matched pieces even though it was not the result of any concerted strategy on the part of the two composers, Mascagni and Leoncavallo. Composed just two years apart, these two dramas of jealousy, passion, and murder, show obvious similarities as early exponents of Italian Opera’s Verismo movement towards greater theatrical reality involving supposedly realistic settings and the dramas of ordinary people as an expression of a slice of life rather than the more noble subjects provided by history, mythology, and tragedy.

In Cavalleria rusticana, it transpires that Turiddu (Lewis Quinn) and Lola (Antonida Kocharova) were once lovers, but when he left to join the army, Lola married another man, Alfio (Brad Noffsinger Morrison). Although Turridu finds consolation in the arms of Santuzza (Maira Georgarou), his obsessive passion for Lola still burns fiercely as he supports his mother Lucia (Leigh Mason), setting the stage for a tale of faithlessness, jealousy and violence, set in a rural community where the church maintains an iron grip on the souls of its people.

Pagliacci tells the tale of Canio (Lewis Quinn), actor and leader of a travelling troupe of commedia dell’arte performers including Tonio (Brad Noffsinger Morrison) and Beppe (Edvard Adde). Canio’s wife, Neddia (Khrystyna Makar) rejects the advances of Tonio, and in revenge he reveals to Canio that she is having an affair, following which Canio swears his own vendetta to find and slaughter the other man, Silvio (Marcus Jakhelln Dawson) with an on-stage audience dragged into the murder, as part of its play-within-a-play format.

An overly minimal set provides two contrasting scenes and whilst I am an advocate of less is more, the neoclassicist backdrop of St George’s Hall did little to reinforce a realistic Italian setting and gave the cast little to work off: there is only so far you can go with constant sighs, foot stamps, and overwrought handwringing to a musical accompaniment. The costumes from Lizzie Clifford and Katie Hubbard were well presented, and the chorus certainly caught the intimate mood of a village scene, so a simple fabric backdrop would have sufficed and provided some acoustic benefit too.

As a concert hall, the venue is acoustically designed for musicians to be on the stage, so it seems an unusual decision to place the orchestra, led by conductor Andrew Charity and comprising fourteen members of Shrewsbury Symphony Orchestra – including Assistant Musical Director and Keyboard Jonathan Ellis – to the front of one side of the stage at stalls level with a reduced connection and harmonisation with the on-stage vocal. I think the production would have benefitted from adopting a concert staging approach seating the reduced-size orchestra to the rear of the stage and allow the de-minimis action to unfold in front of them, indeed Pag even anticipates some on stage musical orchestration.

There were strong performances from the principals with good support from the chorus throughout although both Quinn and Morrison tended to sing too loudly which lost clarity and tone as it reverberated around the harder surfaces of the hall where some fabric baffles would not go amiss, whilst Georgarou and Makar appeared to struggle at the top of their ranges.

Kocharova was impressive as Lola with a fine all-round performance and vocal whilst Adde stood out similarly with his humorous and lively Beppe whilst Dawson sung strongly as Silvio.

One can’t knock the spirit and sentiment behind the production but certainly as the second performance of the day, it seemed a missed chance to appreciate the challenges and opportunities this venue provides.

Reviewer: Mark Davoren

Reviewed: 11^th May 2025

North West End UK Rating: