Riccardo Muti leads the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Chicago Symphony Chorus and a cast of outstanding soloists in Pietro Mascagni’s Cavalleria rusticana. As an opera, Cavalleria rusticana is one of the most enduring works for the stage, and its extraordinary popularity has never waned. This exquisite concert performance from February 2020 vividly captures the unforgettable cut of its melodies, the intoxicating colors of its Sicilian atmosphere and the urgent, heart-racing pace of its drama, which has few equals in the repertoire. The entire ensemble, featuring the notable portrayal of Santuzza by mezzo-soprano Anita Rachvelishvili, captures all the emotion and nuance of Mascagni’s opera as it hurtles toward its inevitable catastrophe — the celebrated Intermezzo offering the only moment of respite. In the early part of its history, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra was in the pit for an astonishing number of operas, including nearly 50 performances of Cavalleria rusticana. The orchestra’s founding music director, Theodore Thomas, conducted the Intermezzo on the second program the Orchestra ever played on October 19, 1891. Riccardo Muti, world-renowned for his superlative interpretations of Italian operas, reunites the orchestral prowess of CSO with the work (one it had not performed in its entirety since 1931) in this definitive 21st-century performance certain to stand the test of time.

REVIEW:

The performers seem determined to make listeners forget the concert setting and hear the drama. Like some other famous mezzo-sopranos, Anita Rachvelishvili handles Santuzza’s music with considerable assurance, including a brilliant high B to conclude the Easter ensemble early in the opera. Generally, she relies mostly on volume to register strong emotion, which can be exciting when the orchestra and voice go all out. She pays somewhat less attention to characterization and to the clarity and impact of the words.

Baritone Luca Salsi has the authentic Italian diction and timbre, as Alfio, to ensure verismo flavor along with passion. It’s mostly a reactive role but also a menacing one, as Salsi shows in his fatal, headlong duet with Santuzza.

In the final scene, Pietro Pretti’s voice shatters, flees, fights, and irrupts madly; it’s the sound of a man suddenly torn apart, facing the abyss. Ronnita Miller’s cavernous tone and tense reactions make Mamma Lucia a one-woman Greek chorus, and Sasha Cooke is alluring in Lola’s brief scene.

Muti is typically masterful in deploying the virtuoso orchestra and, of course, the excellent chorus, which plays a crucial role in the work. In the Intermezzo, he departs from his own tradition, balancing the rage and terror of the drama with unexpected restraint. Conductors on recordings have gone overboard in the Intermezzo’s climactic main theme ever since Mascagni’s own recording, in 1940, never sparing the string vibrato and tripling the forte indicated in the score. But here, almost startlingly, Muti shades and lightens the texture, suggesting rare poignancy and hints of grace.

-- Opera News

REVIEWS:
BBC Music (6/98, p.64) - Performance: 3 (out of 5), Sound: 4 (out of 5) - "...Dennis O'Neill is a first-rate Turiddu, Phillip Joll an adequate Alfio and the veteran Elizabeth Bainbridge characterises Mamma Lucia vigorously. The conductor, David Parry, chooses convincing tempos and gives firm support to the singers."

Classical Music

Classical Music

REVIEW:

“Mascagni in Concert” is an entry in Chandos’s valuable series of 20th-century Italian orchestral releases. Casella, Petrassi, Dallapiccola, Wolf-Ferrari, and Rota discs have previously been issued, all conducted by the excellent Gianandrea Noseda, whose phenomenally busy recording career has reached Neeme Järvi-like proportions.

Mascagni composed short works for orchestra throughout his career, in between composing operas, moments of which are echoed in all of these works. The disc presents the music in more or less the reverse chronological order of composition, opening with the two most interesting compositions. (See the headnote for the program order).

In his final orchestral work, L’apoteosi della cicogna (Apotheosis of the Stork) composed in 1930, Mascagni’s creation of a few melodically accessible motives, subtly harmonized and masterfully orchestrated, achieves the awe-inspiring effect that so much movie music aims for. If L’apoteosi would work perfectly as background for the opening credits of an inspirational, big budget Hollywood film, the gentler Visione lirica (1922), a miniature tone poem inspired by a Bernini statue depicting Saint Tesesa in a state of ecstasy, might well complement some of its tenderer moments.

The two skillfully crafted opening selections deserve some of the popularity of Mascagni’s greatest hit, the Intermezzo from Cavalleria Rusticana (1890), which isn’t officially part of Noseda’s program, but makes a reworked appearance in the form of an Ave Maria setting for tenor and orchestra. It, the songlike Padre nostro (1881), and the Serenade that’s part of the Eternal City score are sung with a feeling for the idiom, but not ideally well by the tenor Luciano Ganci. (The Ave Maria feels too quickly driven by Noseda).

After the impressive opening selections, the program offers lighter fare: the Gavotta , an orchestrated piano miniature, the Danza , an exotic character piece featuring a solo flute, and the two religious works with solo voice, each of which is quite melodically charming and well scored, if not of great import.

The disc concludes with a once lost, now rediscovered, 1902 orchestral score of Mascagni’s very ballet-like, melodically engaging suite of incidental music to The Eternal City , an epic play by the once popular English novelist Thomas Henry Hall Caine. Mascagni’s score concentrates on the play’s romantic aspects, rather than its theme of separation of church and state. It, along with the Ave Maria, Padre nostro , and the Serenade, receives its first recording.

I must confess that I’m only familiar with three of Mascagni’s 15 operas: Cavalleria, L’Amico Fritz , and Iris , each notably different from the other. ( Iris , a kind of cruelly decadent Madama Butterfly , has a lot of wonderful music and should be revived by a major American company.) Cesare Orselli’s very detailed, informative notes for this CD suggest that all of Mascagni’s orchestral pieces might be better appreciated if the listener is acquainted with such works as Il piccolo Marat, Guglielmo Ratcliff, Le maschere , and Nerone.

The Filharmonica ‘900 Teatro Reggio Torino was founded in 2003, at the initiative of the musicians of Turin’s distinguished opera orchestra. It is a first-rate ensemble, and Noseda conducts fluent, dynamic performances. Chandos’s sound is warm and detailed, and I can recommend this appealing CD.

-- Fanfare

Starring Stefka Evstatieva, Giacomo Aragall, Anna Di Mauro and Eduard Tumagian in the leading roles. Rousingly performed by Alexander Rahbari and the Czech/Slovak RSO.

Mascagni’s “poème dramatique en deux actes” had its première in Monte Carlo on 16 March 1905, with Geraldine Farrar in the leading role. An Italian version was immediately staged in Rome. I presume that the only previous recording of this brief opera, recorded in Budapest in 1995 under Marco Pace and starring Katia Ricciarelli, was sung in Italian, so here we have a first for the original in French.

If beginnings were everything this opera would be at least as good as “Das Rheingold”. If, a bit more logically, we compare Mascagni’s dawn with Puccini’s prelude to Act III of Tosca, we must surely recognize the difference between the inspired natural poet and the cunning purveyor of effects.

The trouble with the cunning purveyor of effects is, they work so damn well. I’m prepared to give Mascagni the benefit of the doubt over his daybreak prelude, however. As the music gathers power and momentum the chorus here proves ragged and few in numbers, while the orchestra is short on strings. The booklet note-writer, Alberto Cantù, admits that the “Inno del Sole” from “Iris” is “something else again”, but I daresay this one would come off too, given a better chance.

This deeply poetic opening sets the stage for what is ostensibly a rustic village wedding in the foothills of the Piedmont Alps. In a series of dances and general invitations to merriment we may note the inventiveness of Mascagni’s orchestral colouring and his continual veering away from the stereotyped music which could so easily have been called upon for such a situation. Then comes the bridegroom-to-be and we get a tenor aria.

This, of course, is where the cunning purveyor of effects scores. Puccini at this point would have come out with something like “Recondita armonia”. Mascagni follows the words with vocal writing that is melodious and expressive without actually blossoming into a melody as such. But wait a moment, are we perhaps listening for the wrong thing? When a Richard Strauss opera breaks into a soliloquy for a leading character, with vocal writing which is similarly melodious and expressive without blossoming into a melody as such, we accept this happily because it’s what we expect. We therefore have to get away from the idea that Mascagni is trying to write a Puccini-tune and not quite managing it and listen more attentively to what he is actually doing. We may then appreciate the mastery of his orchestral backdrop, which in its motivic interest, thematic entwining and variegated colour places Mascagni firmly among the Middle-European post-romantics. Post-romantic, too, is the somewhat acidic tinge to the vocal lines. If we are reminded of Puccini, it is more likely to be the later Puccini of “La Fanciulla del West”, where he, too, began to head in this same direction.

Another problem – not Mascagni’s fault – is that we are used to hearing Puccini and Strauss better sung than this. David Sotgiu has a quite pleasing voice when singing quietly, and at first I wondered if he would be able to present the case for not singing this sort of music full blast. Alas, he fails to expand and drive the music home to us. And this is only the beginning … Giorgio is actually described as “fragile and suffering”, but opera is about suspended disbelief and a fragile Giorgio can’t deliver the goods any more than a fragile Butterfly or a genuinely tubercular Violetta.

Thus far, however, we might go along with the portrayal, since Giorgio, the presumed bridegroom, actually introduces in this aria the first blight on the idyllic scene, the first faltering suggestion that things are not what they seem. For this is an arranged marriage – arranged for fairly cynical reasons I won’t go into here – and the lady’s not going to play. Amica, we soon discover, is passionately in love with Giorgio’s “solid and vigorous” brother Rinaldo, who has been driven out of the home. However, while Amica rejects Giorgio’s overtures, she does not reveal who it is she really loves. Here, and in the subsequent confrontation with her foster-father Camoine, we find that Anna Malavasi has a voice that is not always soundly produced, but with something of the scale to get the music across. There is a frisson to the singing which has been lacking so far.

Rinaldo, in response to a letter from Amica, arrives on the scene. The two love each other as much as ever and Amica reveals the marriage that is being forced on her but, also in this case, does not say who the intended bridegroom actually is. Rinaldo curses the man “who seeks to have your love” and they flee to the mountains. Giorgio catches sight of them in the distance, without recognizing Rinaldo, and gives chase, intending to avenge himself on the “thief of love”. Just to add to the drama, a thunderstorm is brewing.

The music has by this time developed from its innocent, colouristic beginnings to a tense, darkly-hued symphonic web driving the action forward. Mascagni now gives full vent to his orchestral mastery with the longest of his many intermezzi – 10:18 in this performance. It should be said that, while the orchestra is rough and ready and the strings undernourished, Manlio Benzi has all the right ideas about how the music should go and this piece comes off pretty powerfully.

Act II takes place in a wild ravine. Giorgio confronts the couple, then draws back on recognizing Rinaldo. Rinaldo is equally astonished. At this point his fraternal love proves stronger than his love for Amica. He accuses the latter of having lied to him and, pitying his weak brother, who has now collapsed in a faint, renounces to her: “His ghost would always rise up between us; and if he lived, each kiss that you gave me would seem to be stolen from my brother”. “If you loved me”, he continues, “let your heart not be deaf to my begging voice … you alone hold Giorgio’s fate in your hands, make him a gift of your pity, of your love”. He leaves, clambering up the sheer rock face. Amica, still declaring her love for Rinaldo, attempts to follow him up the cliff, but falls into the torrent below. Giorgio has by now come to and as the opera ends Rinaldo attempts to rejoin his brother.

All this action is underpinned by powerful orchestral writing, basically a continuation of the intermezzo. Pierluigi Dilengite’s rather hoarse, barking baritone is unable to express much against this backdrop and even Anna Malavasi is reduced to ungainly shouting. This means that the effectiveness of the opera is not really proved either way. Could a Gobbi or a Taddei have given Rinaldo at this point the humanity which Mascagni evidently wants? Could a Callas have involved us emotively in Amica’s desperate final gesture (maybe Geraldine Farrar was able to do this)?

My worry is that, while I think this opera may be musically a masterpiece – it certainly exhibits rare mastery – it may fail to engage us at the human level we expect of an operatic masterpiece. Rinaldo’s sacrifice is, logically, completely useless and even silly. It’s obvious that the lady’s not for turning – he seems to expect her to switch her love from one to the other rather as a bath-tap switches from hot to cold water by moving the lever from left to right – so his own loss is of no benefit to his brother. Surely he could not have imagined otherwise? On the other hand, I’ve tried juggling the situation in my mind to produce a number of alternative endings, but most of them seem worse still. The cunning purveyor of effects might have thought of something, though, and exacted suitable changes from his librettist.

So what can we say? The musical riches of this opera demand a hearing. From this version you’ll get some idea of the orchestral mastery and the sureness with which it progresses from an idyllic beginning to a darkly dramatic conclusion in a short space of time. Anna Malavasi’s singing in the first act, at least, gives a fair hint of the sort of frisson the music could presumably have all through with a high-octane international cast. And, in spite of the positive judgement on Manlio Benzi, a Gavazzeni in the pit might have helped the singers by creating more transparent textures. Unfortunately I am unable to say whether the Ricciarelli/Pace version is any better. Michael Oliver’s Gramophone review (2/97) reports a fairly effective performance, very poorly recorded. The present recording has all the bangs and thumps we expect from a live theatre production but is technically more than acceptable. The likelihood of another version seems remote. It has become a truism among Mascagni lovers that his operas – post-Cavalleria – are a treasure-house of wonderful music which is in abeyance because the singers with the heft to cope with them are a lost breed. This is not the only recording which seems to prove them right on both counts.

-- Christopher Howell, MusicWeb International

Classical Music

In the search for a specific form and language, the music of “Sì”, under the modernist patina, returns to our most sincere sources, to the spirits of comedy and comic opera. After all, the audience of the melodrama found in the 'little lyric' a sort of deforming nail in which situations, behaviours and conventions were reflected with polite caricature. Such was the Mascagni operetta, which, in its background of parodist grotesque, re-enacts the petty-bourgeois salacity, even in the title: Sì, from the name of the protagonist, so called because she never knew say no to anyone. In this operetta Mascagni lavished the gifts of his most spontaneous melody; the letters aria sung by Vera, the andantino of the duet in Act 1, the page of the wedding party in act 2, the seduction duet between Chablis and Vera, the “sad waltz” sung by Sì; the prelude for strings opening Act 3. The Mascagni talent however reveal itself in the entire score with his fluent streak, rhythmic liveliness, and skill for developing the ensemble scenes.

Inactive since Il Piccolo Marat (1921), on March 23, 1932 Mascagni reproposed Pinotta, reelaborated from his cantata In Filanda. The Author’s interventions in 1932 were undoubtedly important: the little chorus of Zeffiri that after the short prelude announces the idyll shows a harmonic restlessness hardly thinkable in a twenty-year-old Mascagni; and the same goes for the unusual effect in the finale, with the two voices whispering a fading “T’amo” on the silence of the orchestra. Also, the rich instrumental ensemble is much wider than the one thought for the cantata. For the symphonic poem with voice A Giacomo Leopardi Mascagni followed the great examples of Liszt, Smetana and Strauss: the poem gets its inspiration not only from the few verses sung by the soprano; wider fragments - quoted in limine on the score - supply the expressive suggestions to the orchestra interludes acting as “bridges” among the different episodes. So we might say that this A Giacomo Leopardi is not a cantata, but a downright symphonic poem where a few singable episodes occasionally emerge. Zanetto can be considered as a “little” opera not because of its short duration, of the orchestra ensemble including no brass or its only two characters (soprano and mezzosoprano en travesti), but because of its decidedly lyrical style and basic lack of action: the act is just a long encounter-conversation in a Renaissance Florence between a young minstrel and Silvia, a rich, bored lady who reciprocates his love but, being a courtesan, cannot allow herself such a feeling and must reject the young boy.

The performance of Cavalleria Rusticana republished in this album took place in the hometown of Mascagni, Livorno, on the occasion of the centenary of the premiere, which took place in 1890 in Rome, at the Teatro Costanzi. Already scheduled for some time, this publication due out in autumn 2021 commemorates one of the most important voices of post-World War II, the tenor Giuseppe Giacomini, recently passed away at the age of 80, and caught here in a role to him particularly congenial and at the zenith of his career. Known and loved by European, American and Asian opera audiences, a unique voice for its richness of harmonics and extension. The English critic Alan Blyth wrote of him: “... he is the true inheritor of the spinto mantle last worn by Corelli, and to some extent by Vickers. Yet his tone, with his strongly baritonal timbre, bears an even closer resemblance to that of Francesco Merli...” Conductor is Bruno Bartoletti, who had a long and honored theatrical and recording career; to be noticed the "extraordinary participation" of Fedora Barbieri in the part of Lucia.

Marek Janowski and the Dresdner Philharmonie present a new recording of Mascagni’s Cavalleria rusticana, the verismo opera par excellence. Mascagni’s debut opera turned him into an overnight world star and continues to captivate listeners today. Even if the depiction of simple village folk and the direct emotional appeal of Cavalleria rusticana were initially greeted as a welcome alternative to the gods, intellectual pretenses and dense orchestral textures of Wagner, Mascagni’s score in fact has many more symphonic qualities than is usually acknowledged. Marek Janowski, a champion of Wagnerian opera and German symphonic music, is the ideal candidate to demonstrate those qualities. He does this together with the Dresdner Philharmonie, the MDR Leipzig Radio Choir and a cast of outstanding vocal soloists, including Melody Moore as Santuzza, Brian Jagde as Turridu and Lester Lynch in the role of Alfio. Marek Janowski is one of the most celebrated conductors of our times and enjoys a vast PENTATONE discography including a recent recording of Weber’s Der Freischütz (2019) with the MDR Leipzig Radio Choir. This recording is the first in a series with the Dresdner Philharmonie, where Janowski currently serves as chief conductor. Melody Moore and Lester Lynch both have been featured on several PENTATONE releases, including Verdi’s Otello (2017). Brian Jagde is one of today’s rising opera tenor stars and makes his PENTATONE debut.

Domingo is in full, burnished voice, rising splendidly to the wild ardour of this underrated opera.

In the words of a survey of nineteenth-century Italian opera, published by the Corriere della sera to mark the turning of the century, Mascagni was "condemned to a masterpiece": after the triumph of Cavalleria rusticana nothing less would do. He lived for another 55 years, and although some of his 14 subsequent operas were immensely successful for a while (he claimed that Iris was better received than Cavalleria, and there was a near-riot of enthusiasm at the premiere of Il piccolo Marat) none was judged by the critics to be the awaited 'masterpiece', and nearly all had fallen from the repertory by the end of his life. It would be a sad enough story if all that he had done was to attempt, vainly, to repeat his first success. The evidence (of Il piccolo Marat, of L'amico Fritz, of Iris—I cannot claim to have heard all fourteen) suggests that he did no such thing, that he had the capacity to develop, and the scruple and the skill to strike out on new paths, and that his very reluctance to repeat himself contributed to the long decline of his career.

Iris is an extremely interesting opera, even (in the context of late nineteenth-century Italy) an 'experimental' one. It contains an elaborate 'play within a play', both triggering the main event of the drama (the abduction of the innocent child Iris by a libertine and his procurer) and foreshadowing its outcome (her father curses her, believing that she has voluntarily become a prostitute) with pathetic irony. There is a duet in which one character speaks while the other sings, and a crucial wordless scene where 'light' music darkens to accompany sinister action. The rich orchestration is filled with cunningly contrived local colour (the opera is set in Japan) from which Puccini clearly learned a thing or two when writing Madama Butterfly six years later (there is an offstage humming chorus in Iris, too . . . ). Each act has a quasisymphonic, atmospheric orchestral prelude, and each scene has at least one strong coup-de-théâtre: the puppet-play itself in Act 1 (Iris is so caught up with the sad story that she is at one point heard in touchingly sympathetic duet with her puppet alter ego); in Act 2, the paper walls of Iris's oppressively luxurious prison slide away to reveal the brothel quarter of Tokyo, with a noisy crowd of eager customers clamouring for her; and the Act 3 curtain rises, not, as we half expect, on Iris's longed for but now desolate home, but on an open sewer, with scavengers rooting among the filth, eventually discovering a body wrapped in mud-spattered silken rags.

And is the music up to it? It is, and it is quite unlike Cavalleria, save in its melodiousness. The once famous "Hymn to the Sun", which opens and closes the opera, has a brazen, only slightly over-the-top splendour. Iris has four solo scenes, each with its own curiously still, passive pathos, rising to heart-warming Italianate eloquence at the end, as she dies, welcoming the rising sun as her deliverer. The odious Osaka has at least the elegant (and also once famous) serenade "Apri la tua finestra" and several other pages of warm and ample ardour (true, he ought to have been the tenor equivalent of Peter Lorre, but would you have written such a part for Fernando de Lucia?) and most of Mascagni's 'experiments' actually work: the 'play within a play' is oddly, grippingly effective; the wordless dance scene is salon music, really, but with a queer dramatic power to it; the three 'visions' that appear to Iris in her degradation, ghosts of those whose egoism has destroyed her, are simple (plain vocal lines over dark solo strings) but telling.

Oh, yes, if you insist, I shall have to admit that Mascagni is Mascagni (which is to say 'like Puccini but not quite so good'); that Illica's vaporous and mystical libretto is something of a liability; and yes, all the characters save Iris are two-dimensional. But the quality of the opera's best pages suggests that Mascagni was the victim of the unkindest injustice of all: condemned for not living up to Cavalleria when he had, if intermittently, surpassed it.

A fine performance and an excellent recording (not the first, as CBS claim; I have heard two others, one of which at least seems not to have been pirated—taken from a Dutch radio tape— both featuring that riveting artist Magda Olivero in the title-role). Tokody's exciting, rather Callas-like voice has a slight wobble under pressure on high notes, but she makes a touching and lull-voiced Iris. Domingo is in full, burnished voice as well (a bit too full in the serenade, perhaps, but rising splendidly to the wild ardour of the scene in which Osaka realizes what he has lost by his contemptuous dismissal of Iris as a mere unresponsive doll). Pons and Giaiotti bring vocal distinction and something like a third dimension of real character to the cynical whore-monger and the stern, blind father; Patané lavishes affectionate care on Mascagni's polychrome orchestra; only a woefully inadequate First Ragpicker lowers the standard of the supporting cast. The whole enterprise is let down rather by the provision of a florid and often ludicrously inaccurate English translation of the libretto, but don't let that put you off. Iris, as Mascagni said, is an opera with almost too much music in it.

-- Gramophone [9/1989]

This is famous 1953 RCA recording of Mascagni’s Cavalleria rusticana, starring three of the greatest singers of the day: Zinka Milanov, Jussi Björling and Robert Merrill.

The recording features Renato Cellini conducting the RCA Victor Symphony Orchestra with the Robert Shaw Chorale, and features singers Zinka Milanov, Jussi Björling, Robert Merrill.

Who today, or in any day, fills Mascagni’s grateful phrases with quite such full, lustrous tone and with such a wealth of feeling for the text as Milanov? This is verismo singing on the grandest, most authentic scale … Like his soprano, Björling’s singing is an exemplar of the spinto style at its best. As Alfio, Merrill turns in one of his most considerable performances on disc.

- Gramophone Magazine

The Messa di Gloria belongs to the period before Cavalleria Rusticana: the lack of a choral or a fugue as well as the simple, almost ingenuous tonalities reveal the dominance of the operatic style over the religious one. Only a careful listening can disclose in the operatic melodies of the Messa di Gloria some kind of references to church music. Echoes of Guglielmo Ratcliff can be heard in the Gratias, and the Incarnatus clearly recalls Turiddu’s “resta abbandonata” from Cavalleria. Before a modern audience the Messa, made of “pray, all love and passion”, as the composer described it, still retains its character. The lyrical element, vehement in the Gloria or tender in the Elevazione, is soaked with Mediterranean feelings, like in a deep and touching popular songs.