Cavalleria rusticana NZ Opera - not actual principalsCav­al­le­ria rus­ti­cana by Mascagni, and Pagli­ac­ci,  by Leon­cav­al­lo, are appar­ent­ly oper­a’s most famous dou­ble bill. Both operas cov­er betrayed love and jeal­ousy.  Both end with a death.  They are sat­is­fy­ing­ly epic in this pro­duc­tion by New Zealand Opera, sup­port­ed by the Vec­tor Welling­ton Orches­tra.

The cur­tain ris­es on an enor­mous rocky out­crop. It’s a bar­ren land­scape which makes the human dra­ma stand out. The stage revolves which was used to par­tic­u­lar effect in CAV dur­ing the pro­ces­sion up to the church. (The night I went one of the loose pieces of set threat­ened to roll off and bean the per­form­ers dur­ing one of the spins. Opera – so excit­ing!) There are four prin­ci­pal singers in each opera. I thought the first cast were more pow­er­ful (i.e. loud­er) than the sec­ond cast, and the sec­ond cast were more dra­mat­ic. They are ably sup­port­ed by a huge cho­rus which includes chil­dren.

CAV is tragedy all the way through. PAG is more comedic. The prin­ci­pals made the most of this oppor­tu­ni­ty. In CAV they stag­gered about fol­low­ing the sto­ry to the inevitable, shock­ing con­clu­sion. In PAG they played to the audi­ence, mak­ing the most of their crazy char­ac­ters. It’s not all won­der­ful. Some­times the stag­ing is seri­ous­ly awk­ward. The sur­titles occa­sion­al­ly stopped for no rea­son that I could see. Luck­i­ly there are only a few of those WTF moments in a most­ly bril­liant pro­duc­tion. (And the singing is fab­u­lous.)