“Cavalleria Rusticana” with Familiar Performers

courtesy of Naxos of America

This Friday the Dutch Pentatone label will release a new recording of Pietro Mascagni’s one-act opera “Cavalleria rusticana.” Recording sessions took place at the Kulturpalast Dresden in March of last year. The release is the first in a series of recordings to be made by the Dresden Philharmonic, whose Chief Conductor is Marek Janowski. However, the album itself is a San Francisco Classical Recording Company Production, which may explain why a few of the key performers are familiar to San Francisco audiences. As usual, Amazon.com is currently taking pre-orders for this new offering.

Janowski is the first among those familiar San Francisco names. He has been a regular visitor to the podium of the San Francisco Symphony for many years. However, unless I am mistaken, his operatic repertoire in Davies Symphony Hall has been limited to instrumental excepts from German sources. On the other hand the leading role of Turiddu in “Cavalleria rusticana” is sung by tenor Brian Jagde, who is making his Pentatone debut. He has fourteen entries in the Performance Archive of the San Francisco Opera (SFO), covering the period from June of 2010 to this past fall season. He made his debut in the role of the miner Joe in Giacomo Puccini’s La fanciulla del West (the girl of the West); and this past November he took the leading role of the Chevalier des Grieux in Puccini’s Manon Lescaut.

Melody Moore, singing the role of Santuzza, will also be familiar to many that attend SFO performances regularly. She made her first appearances during the 2005–2006 season, first as the Countess Almaviva in Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s K. 492 The Marriage of Figaro, followed by the role of Kate Pinkerton (another wife on “the wrong side of fate”) in Puccini’s Madama Butterfly. Her most recent appearance was in the title role of Puccini’s Tosca in the fall of 2012.

Since this new release consists only of audio, it provides a better opportunity to pay attention to Mascagni’s music than a staged production (or a video document of one) would afford. In a concert hall setting this opera affords only the Intermezzo music that precedes the violent conclusion of the narrative. This is not necessarily a representative sample of how tightly structured the overall score is. Like the most effective one-act operas, the narrative proceeds from episode to episode at a brisk pace, allowing character development to unfold more through the pace of the plot than through extended self-reflecting arias.

Janowski clearly appreciates this taut overall sense of pace. He never lets the music drag; and he encourages the “prose rhetoric” assigned to his solo vocalists, summoning the instrumental music into the task of narration, allowing both the orchestra and the singers to advance the plot line with the intensity it deserves. Because this is a familiar opera, listeners will be able to evoke impressions of past stagings of the opera while listening to this recording. The vividness of those memories will have much to do with the expressiveness that Janowski and his vocalists bring to Mascagni’s score, even when confined to their own metaphorical empty stage.