NCPA

The National Centre for Performing Arts (NCPA) will present the Symphony Orchestra of India’s 12th Celebrity Season from February 18 to 26, 2012, featuring two Grand Operas. Following the stellar success of Puccini’s Madama Butterfly in February 2008 and Tosca in September 2010, the NCPA brings you the classic duo, Pietro Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana and Ruggero Leoncavallo’s I Pagliacci

Since they first burst onto the operatic scene at the end of the 19th Century, both these one act operas have performed together in several opera seasons worldwide, and have become euphemistically known as ‘Opera’s Heavenly Twins’. Both operas propelled their respective composers to instant fame, providing the high drama of verismo (true to life) opera. They present dramatic stories of love, jealousy, betrayal, murder and societal privation with such marvelously impassioned music that the exciting, harmonic and melodic structure of the music itself tends to impinge immediately on the audiences’ emotions.

Cavalleria Rusticana by Pietro Mascagni (1863-1945) became his most performed work, and therefore, the most famous of his fifteen operas and one operetta. Theatre statistics show that by the time he died in 1945, the opera had received more than 14,000 performances in Italy alone, and by the turn of the century it had been heard in every major operatic centre across Europe, Russia, and America. 

Ruggero Leoncavallo’s(1858-1919) Pagliacci performed frequently with Cavellaria Rusticana, as a curtain raiser, has remained one of the most popular of operas world over, ever since its premiere in 1892. Stimulated by Mascagni’s enormous success with Cavalleria Rusticana, Leoncavallo – not only a composer but also a librettist, decided to write an opera in the same vein and called it Pagliacci(Clowns). It was also the great tenor Enrico Caruso’s signature role. 

Programme

Saturday, February 18, 2012, at 7.00 pm

Monday, February 20, 2012, at 7.00 pm

Tuesday, February 21, 2012, at 7.00 pm

I Pagliacci

An Opera in 2 Acts by Ruggero Leoncavallo 

Canio: Francesco Anile, Mickael Spadaccini 

Nedda: Sabina Cvilak

Tonio: Silvio Zanon

Beppe: FilippoAdami

Silvio: Javier Arrey

Interval

Cavalleria Rusticana

An Opera in 1 Act by Pietro Mascagni

Santuzza: Elena Bocharova 

Turiddu: Giancarlo Monsalve, Mickael Spadaccini

Alfio: GevorgHakobyan

Lola: Marianna Vinci

Conductor – AntonelloAllemandi (February 18 and 20)

Assistant Conductor – MatteoPais

Conductor –Zane Dalal (February 21)

Stage Director – Willy Landin

Set Designer CavalleriaRusticana – Juan Carlos Greco

Set Designer I Pagliacci – Juan Carlos Greco and Willy Landin

Costume Designer – Nidia Ponce

Light Designer – Juan Carlos Greco

The Symphony Orchestra of India

Music Director – Marat Bisengaliev

Members of the Kazakh State Philharmonic Capella

The Paranjoti Academy Chorus 

Living Voices

Stop-Gaps Cultural Academy

Chorus Masters – Riccardo Bonci and Diego Mingolla

An NCPA Production with original design, sets, lighting and costumes from

Teatro Argentino and Teatro Solís de Montevideo

Production coordinator – Gian Galeazzo Ganzarolli