Nedda

The work creates a metadramatic tightrope when Nedda’s husband, Canio, takes vengeance for her infidelity both in a comedy onstage and with a villager.

Nedda, the leading female character of Leoncavallo’s “Pagliacci,” must die rather than consummate true love.

In “Pag,” the soprano Aleksandra Kurzak, married to Mr. Alagna in real life, is here the wife who betrays him, to her doom, playing Nedda as more headstrong than wistful, her voice vulnerable in texture but firm in presence.

As Nedda, his straying wife, the soprano Jessica Rose Cambio sings with agile coloratura and mostly shimmering sound.

The baritone Michael Corvino is the humiliated Tonio, whose aggressive advances are stingingly rejected by Nedda.