A bleeding, inch-thick hunk of verismo sirloin: Royal Opera's Cav and Pag reviewed

One legacy of lockdown in the classical music world has been the sheer length of the 21-22 season. In a typical year, most orchestras and urban opera companies would be winding down by mid-May. Not this time: after two years of postponements, and with lost income to recoup, seasons are stretching out like the finale of Dvorak’s Cello Concerto. Rumour maintains that audiences are being stretched too thinly, and although it’d be naive to infer anything fundamental from a smattering of vacant seats, it did feel surprising to see empty patches for the first night of the Royal Opera’s Cav and Pag. Absent Kaufmaniacs, disappointed by Jonas’s latest no-show? (He cancelled last month with Covid-related vocal problems, and has since confirmed that he will not appear later in the run.)

Or an insufficiently appetising offer in an unusually crowded field? There’s something about the automatic pairing of these two operas that always carries with it an air of the store cupboard. A reliable standby, then, pulled off the shelf at the fag end of a long year, and failing the taste test in the absence of Big J’s hot sauce? Not a bit of it: even after multiple changes, this was a cast to make you salivate. SeokJong Baek, straight out of Samson et Dalila, stepped up as Turiddu, and Roberto Alagna sang Canio. Add Pappano in the pit (and he really is the business in this kind of repertoire) and this was anything but a bland reheat. It was a bleeding, inch-thick hunk of verismo sirloin, slavered in oil and garlic and smacked straight on to white-hot coals.