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...