This week the Israeli Opera performed two short operas, which will be performed in one evening: "Cavalria Rusticana" ("Rural Chivalry") by Maskani and "Oleko" by Rachmaninoff, which is being performed for the first time in Israel.
Both works were written more or less at the same time - Cavalria Rusticana was first performed in 1890, and Elko, one of the three operas completed by Rachmaninoff, was written in 1892 - and both deal with similar themes, chief among them destructive male jealousy.
But despite this, the two operas are very different from each other.
"Cavaleria Rusticana" belongs to the Italian Verismo movement, which sought to describe the rough lives of the common people - and in the case of "Cavaleria Rusticana", hard-working Sicilian peasants - while "Alco" belongs to the Russian romantic tradition, and is based on the poem "Gypsies" by Pushkin.
From "Elko", photo: Yossi Tzbaker
Rachmaninov, who this year marks the 150th anniversary of his birth, wrote "Elko" when he was only 19 years old, about a decade before he became famous in the world thanks to his second piano concerto.
The hero of the opera is Elko, a young Russian man who abandoned his homeland, joined a traveling band of gypsies and started a family with the gypsy Zamfira.
But the idyll is soon broken: the freed Zamfira falls in love with a young gypsy, and Elko is tormented by jealousy.
Both operas end, as usual in the genre, in a sad way.
The director, Juan Anton Requi, created a plot framework common to both operas: he set the plot in a conservative Italian village in the 1960s, where the heroes of "Cavaleria Rusticana" live - and on the outskirts of the village a gypsy camp is established, where the heroes of "Alco" live.
Such a complex opera evening, with two productions so different from each other, is a huge musical challenge, requiring a large and skilled team of singers.
Ella Vasilvitsky, Elchin Azizov and Valentin Dityuk will participate in the "Elko" production, and Sergei Polyakov, Anastasia Boldirova, Anat Cherny and others will participate in "Cavalry Rusticana".
The conductor of the production will be Alessandro de Marchi, who impressed two years ago with a brilliant conducting of "The Book of Seville".
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