#Aleko by Sergej Vasil'evič Rachmaninov and #Pagliacci by Ruggero Leoncavallo inaugurate the opera season 2025/2026 of the #TeatroMassimo of Palermo directed by Silvia Paoli and Maestro Francesco Lanzillotta conducting on the podium
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In the month in which the Day against violence against women is celebrated, the Teatro Massimo inaugurates the opera season 2025-2026, Friday 21 November 2025 all 19:00, with an unpublished diptych that combines Russian realism with Italian realism and talks about the tragic relevance of femicide.
Student, first performed in stage form in Italy, is the one-act opera by Sergei Rachmaninov, su libretto di Vladimir Nemirovic-Dcenko, based on Pushkin's poem The Gypsies. It is compared for the first time to Pagliacci, the drama in a prologue and two acts, with music and libretto by Ruggero Leoncavallo.
The installation is a new production by the Teatro Massimo Foundation and sees the debut in Palermo of director Silvia Paoli, who with his vision puts the two events into dialogue, united by the theme of violence against women. The maestro returns to conduct on the podium of the Teatro Massimo Orchestra Francesco Lanzillotta with an international cast that sees the Azerbaijani baritone Elchin Azizov interpret Aleko and Tonio, the soprano Carólina Lopez Moreno is Zemfira and Nedda, and the tenor Brian Jagde takes on the role of Canio. Interpreters committed to giving body and voice to emblematic characters: Russian exile Aleko seeks freedom but is not willing to grant it to his partner Zemfira; Canio, betrayed by Nedda, he finds himself reliving in reality the betrayal suffered in fiction and chooses to wash away the shame with blood. Zemfira e Nedda, Unlike, they claim the freedom to self-determine and to love without constraints.
In the alternative cast the same roles are played respectively by Federico Longhi, Tetiana Miyus and Ivan Magrì. To complete the cast: Pavel Kolgatin (young gypsy), Petar Naydenov (old gypsy), Gustavo Castillo (Silvio), Matteo Mezzaro (Beppe), Antonio Barbagallo and Federico Cucinotta (a farmer), Gianmarco Randazzo and Francesco Polizzi (another farmer). The predominantly female creative team counts on Eleonora De Leo (Scene), Ilaria Ariemme (costumes), Fiammetta Baldiserri (lighting designer), Marcello Lumaca (lighting designer collaborator), Daisy Ransom–Phillips (choreography), Lisa Capaccioli (assistant director), Alice Perez (costume help), Elena Madia (scene help).
The opening of the season involves all the teams of the Foundation: Coro, Children's choir, Ballet Company and Orchestra of the Teatro Massimo. Choir Master Salvatore Punturo, Director of the Corps de ballet Jean-Sébastien Colau.
Composed in the same years, Aleko and Pagliacci (1892), they are two works by authors, very different musical languages and aesthetics. But they are similar in structure, characters and the themes from which they draw inspiration: man's inability to accept woman's freedom and independence, the obsession with possession and the violence that transcends into femicide. The diptych thus becomes a single great discourse in which the two works are reflected as parts of the same narrative that recounts violence from different perspectives, with similar dynamics and characters: a betrayed man, a woman who wants to start a new life, and a tragic epilogue in which man, discovered his partner's infidelity, rather than let her go he kills her. A violence that tragically echoes in contemporary society.
“The brutality of Canio and Aleko still survives in our everyday life – says director Silvia Paoli – «the man takes his rights back, and the heart that bleeds wants blood to wash away the shame" sings Canio in Pagliacci. And it is the echo of the old theory of honor killing, the idea that woman is the property of man, that its independence is a disgrace. Honor killings in Italy were only abolished in 1981, and little seems to have changed. Data and news continually remind us of this: the women killed, in Italy, in 2025,
I'm more than 70 to date. This is why I wanted fiction and reality to intertwine from the beginning. The show opens with 75 stab wounds, a number that may seem excessive or provocative, but which corresponds to the stab wounds inflicted on Giulia Cecchettin by her ex-boyfriend. This action puts the spectator in front of a fact, a monstrosity, an excess which is however sadly real, vero. It's not possible, today, talk about feminicide without referring to everyday life. This is why I would have liked to have had the exact number of women killed on stage up until the opening day, but this will not be possible given the quantity of victims; there will be representation: I asked the theater workers, delicate, make-up artists, toolmakers, to arrive on stage with a flower to place on Zemfira's body, women who want to remember that we cannot look the other way, who tell us how much this drama affects each and every one of us".
“It's interesting to see how, in Aleko and Pagliacci, the same theme was addressed with different musical languages by two very different and distant composers – adds the conductor Francesco Lanzillotta, among the most accomplished conductors of his generation –. The scores, while describing different worlds and aesthetics, they deal with a practically identical story: in Aleko's case it is a company of gypsies, in Pagliacci's it is a circus company, she falls in love with someone else but is with a man who, in both works, he will turn into his killer. I believe that one of the main functions of the Opera Theater is to regain its central role within society and to regain it it is necessary that it also deals with contemporary themes of social relevance. It is important to commission composers more new works that deal with contemporary themes”.
The show starts from Aleko's ending and the death of the protagonist who, in the limbo of passing, recalls the sequences and events of the past backwards. The scene appears to be a suspended place, where objects are born from memory: a sofa, a bathtub or a wardrobe. In Pagliacci, however, the space is concrete, real, colored, the honor killing, inspired by a news story, it is the mirror image of Aleko's. And Zemfira's story repeats itself with that of Nedda, this time with a paying audience to witness the death but, as Canio sings, “The comedy is over!”.
SYNOPSIS: The Russian Aleko, settled in a gypsy camp to seek freedom, lives with Zemfira. His possessive jealousy clashes with the free code of the gypsies, and Zemfira abandons him for another man from a nearby gypsy camp. Student, feeling betrayed and failed, surprises them together at dawn and, blinded by anger, kills them both. For this act of violence and possessiveness, foreign to their culture, the gypsies abandon Aleko, leaving him alone with his despair. Pagliacci instead tells of a company of wandering actors. The comedian Canio, madly jealous, he suspects that his wife Nedda has a lover. During the theatrical performance, fiction is confused with reality and Canio, blinded by anger, kills Nedda and her lover in real life.
The debut of the work is preceded, Tuesday 18 November at 18:30, in the Sala ONU from an introductory conference on listening organized by the Amici del Teatro Massimo Association, who invited Aleko Anna Giust to speak, professor of Russian language and literature at the University of Verona, which carries out research on the Russian opera repertoire in the musical field.
Replies: 22, 23, 25, 26, 27 November
Info: https://www.teatromassimo.it/event/aleko-pagliacci/
Press Office of the Teatro Massimo Foundation:
Giovannella Brancato +39 340 8334979 mail stampa@teatromassimo.it
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