In his final season as Principal Guest Conductor, Sir Mark Elder leads a performance of the most concise and emotive opera in the Italian verisimo tradition. Cavalleria Rusticana is a tale of obsession, jealousy and love turning lethal set to some of the most heartbreaking music composed for the opera stage. On Easter Morning in a Sicilian village, a local woman shunned by her community and abandoned by her lover faces a choice: expose her former love’s affair with a married woman risking a very public vengeance, or allow the sacred rituals to mask injustice and drown-out her cries?

Having led English National Opera at its height in the 1990s, Sir Mark Elder continues to conduct the leading opera companies of the world including the Palau de les Arts Reina Sofía in Valencia where he has been Music Director since 2025. He has assembled a first-class cast led by Ekaterina Semenchuk’s Santuzza for this concert performance of Pietro Mascagni’s emotive one-act opera, a piece of music theatre that can set the blood racing like few others.