Royal Opera’s Cavalleria rusticana isn’t nearly vulgar enough

How often do you get a chance to see two operas by Leoncavallo in the same city in the same week? Never, until this last week in London, when Opera Rara gave a concert performance of Zazà at the Barbican, and six days later the Royal Opera mounted its first production since the 1980s of Cav. and Pag. Both Leoncavallo and Mascagni are routinely thought of as one-opera composers. Zazà didn’t do a lot to undermine that view, and I doubt whether if it had been staged it would have made any stronger an impression. Like Pag., its libretto is by the composer: Wagner seems to have made that temporarily mandatory. But the plot is feeble almost to the point of nonexistence. Zazà is a club singer who falls for one of the clients, finds out that he is married with a young teenage daughter, and so renounces him, though rather surprisingly no one dies. Zazà was sung by Ermonela Jaho, the Albanian singer who has made a worldwide reputation in La Traviata, on which this opera is clearly modelled. It’s a pity that the Barbican provided no scenery for her to chew, because if they had she would certainly have obliged. As it was she had only the music stand to wrestle with. Her performance was so intense, committed and indeed abandoned — and she does have a thrilling and powerful voice — that it was impossible not to be excited. How far the impression she made will survive transference to record remains to be heard. The whole performance, conducted by Maurizio Benini, as almost all performances of Italian opera anywhere are, was a model of precision and passion. The BBC Symphony Orchestra played their hearts out in an unrewarding score, and the excellent team of singers surpassed even Opera Rara’s normal high standards.