Pietro Mascagni’s “Cavalleria rusticana” might have been a one-hit wonder for its composer but it was Satchmo’s favorite opera. In the mid-1920s, Louis Armstrong would pop out of the pit at the Vendome Theatre at 3145 S. State St., where he gigged with the Erskine Tate Orchestra, to play the famed, three-minute “Intermezzo” on his trumpet and once noted that if any opera could swing, it would be this one.

Lyric musical director Enrique Mazzola didn’t exactly make the Lyric Orchestra swing Saturday night, mi dispiace, no, but he certainly pushed for a lush, enveloping volume, an accessibly immersive melodic experience that has antecedents in the scores of Andrew Lloyd Webber, John Williams and even the Scottish composer John Lunn, who wrote the music for “Downton Abbey.” Mascagni’s lush music was proto-Hollywood scoring and the libretto by Giovanni Targioni-Tozzetti and Guido Menasci involving love and betrayal in a Calabrian village was the prototype of the verismo genre, operas about ordinary folks that emerged as the European theater was also discovering the power of domestic realism.

It’s hard now to appreciate the sensation caused when the curtain rose on ordinary people singing such grand music; it was a tool of populist empowerment. And, frankly, it remains so.

“Cavalleria rusticana,” which stars the baritone SeokJong Baek as Turiddu, the fine Welsh soprano Camille Robles as Lola (who has a long history with this Welsh staging), Lyric regular Lauren Decker as Mamma Lucia and the Russian mezzo-soprano Yulia Matochkina as Santuzza, is a longtime favorite in Chicago. It  was performed here as early as 1891 by the touring Metropolitan Opera and was an early arrival into the repertory of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

Russell Thomas and Gabriella Reyes in the operatic double feature “Cavalleria rusticana & Pagliacci” by Lyric Opera of Chicago. (Todd Rosenberg)

Original director Elijah Moshinsky’s lively and long-lived production (revived this time by director Peter McClintock) is paired with the same directors’ and designers’ staging of Ruggero Leoncavallo’s “Pagliacci” (speaking of one-hit wonders), updated to post-war Italy and starring Russell Thomas in the Canio role long associated with Pavarotti, along with the superb Quinn Kelsey as Tonio, the baritone Luke Sutliff as the amorous villager Silvio and the Nicaraguan American soprano Gabriella Reyes as Nedda, Canio’s kinda’ complicated wife.

Taken together, these two 90-minute operas are pretty much what people who never go to the Lyric think of as what always goes on at the Lyric. The former general director, Anthony Freud, had a shrewd, twin-track philosophy when it came to long-planned programming to sustain his venerable institution: rotate challenge with the comfortingly familiar. With “Cav/Pag,” we are in the latter category, to say the least.

Certainly, the productions do not fight against that identity: Michael Yeargan’s set for “Cavalleria rusticana,” which gets filled with humans living in close proximity, puts one in mind of the decor of the Loop’s Italian Village, an eatery with a long Lyric association. And, in the case of “Pagliacci,” if you close your eyes for a second, you can easily imagine some Chicago wise guy, after a hard day’s work in the 1930s, slipping into his seat and crying his eyes out alongside the tears of a clown, betrayed in love and yet still forced to go to work. One imagines broader sympathy with the clown’s final word than is now the case.

The company of “Cavalleria rusticana” in the operatic double feature “Cavalleria rusticana & Pagliacci” by Lyric Opera of Chicago. (Todd Rosenberg)

Overall, “Cavalleria rusticana” is the more satisfying part of the double-bill. Baek’s beautifully sung Turiddu is just counter-intuitive enough to keep things fresh, and the musically restless Robles is similarly potent and in the present tense: I suspect the debuting Baek will be back.  “Pagliacci” starts off fabulously well with Kelsey’s magnificently sung prologue. But the overall problem here, as the love, villainy and betrayals begin to unspool, is that you don’t feel enough within what should be an empathy machine.

Why not? Certainly, the principals, including Thomas, are stellar singers but the emotional landscape gets lost in atmospheric details: the stage is filled with highly entertaining characters, including the children’s choir now known as Uniting Voices Chicago. But the trajectory of the sexual and emotional betrayal that informs this deeply felt opera is insufficiently focused on raw human feeling and, to my mind, the love Canio feels for Nedda is never sufficiently well established to raise the stakes. It’s not that Thomas lacks genuine passion as he sings, and the quality of his voice is well known at Lyric, but he’s a tad inclined toward introspection here. That creates something of a disconnect, given that this music pretty much invented the concept of singing your working-class heart out. Clown makeup running and all.

Interestingly and with an admiring nod to Decker in “Cavalleria rusticana,” it’s Kelsey, the only performer doing double-duty with “Cav/Pag,” whose work is the most interesting of the pairing. Perhaps that is because his efforts afforded him the opportunity to aspects of the one in the other and vice versa; that would make sense, given that “Pagliacci” was, commercially speaking, anyway, penned as a response to “Cavalleria rusticana.”

Still, old-school pleasures abound from two operas with such throbbing Chicago connections.

The great Lyric marketer Danny Newman would have reminded punters they were getting two operas for the price of one.

Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.

cjones5@chicagotribune.com

Review: “Cavallaria rusticana ” (3.5 stars) and “Pagliacci” (3 stars).

When: Through Nov. 23

Where: Lyric Opera of Chicago, 20 N. Wacker Drive.

Running time: 3 hours, 15 minutes

Tickets: $49-$385 at 312-827-5600 and www.lyricopera.org

https://www.chicagotribune.com/2025/11/02/review-cavalleria-lyric-opera/