The Twinberry Auditorium in the Senior Center is the venue for our filmed opera production playing on Wednesday, September 17th. Doors open at 1:30 pm, the opera starts at 2:00 pm. Following the film, a facilitator-led discussion will allow viewers to participate in a dialogue on the film.

Cavalleria Rusticana/Pagliacci

Two operas for the price of one! Actually, they are both free. Pietro Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana (1890) and Ruggero Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci (1892), written just two years apart, have almost always been presented as a double bill, affectionately called Cav/Pag by opera professionals. Both short operas portray a humble southern Italian working-class community on a Roman Catholic feast day, and both concern love triangles that turn violent and deadly. The frank, intense, swift, and economical musical language of these turbulent tales set in the world of ordinary people helped give birth to the short-lived but wildly popular and endlessly influential operatic style called verismo.

Director David McVicar has set both Cavalleria Rusticana and Pagliacci in the same imagined Sicilian village. But Cavalleria takes place in its original time period, circa 1900, while Pagliacci is set two generations later, in the post–World War II period. Tenor Marcelo Álvarez stars in both, with soprano Eva-Maria Westbroek in Cav, and Patricia Racette in Pag.