Twin operas from Italy

Packed with powerful performances, the plots of Cav/Pag, as the double bill is popularly called, uncannily mirror each other. Raymond Zhou reports.

The National Center for the Performing Arts in Beijing, where getting a new production onstage is famously tough, recently hired Giancarlo del Monaco to direct the twin operas Cavalleria Rusticana and Pagliacci and infuse them with Italianate jealousy, betrayal and bloodshed.

Their staging last week was richly romantic, at least to the modernist, and therefore justifiably operatic for the emerging audiences of classical opera in China.