Cilea's backstage melodrama, with its mix of romantic pathos and high-grade bitchery, tends to bring out the best in sopranos who champion it. Montserrat Caballe hits a career high in this September 20, 1976, Tokyo performance, and everyone else rises to her level.

Caballe limns the protagonist with great style (and an intimidating set of false eyelashes), her timbre lush and beautifully sustained on the breath, as in "Poveri fiori." Prodigies of inflection abound, and the morbidezza that colors the death scene is uniquely hers. The soprano's breath control often enables her to hang back of the tempo, and "Io son l'umile ancella" moves at fragmented half-speed.

Her Maurizio is the young José Carreras, in magnificent vocal estate and matching Caballe in long-lined phrasing. Carreras' rapport with his partner (gallantly fishing a fallen earring out of her bosom at one point) generates a romantic frisson. Surprisingly, Caballe gives a charming, improbably sexy performance. declaiming the spoken monologues with fire.

Fiorenza Cossotto delivers a fierce Princess, tempered with suavity and wounded femininity. Cossotto's vampishness plays effectively against Carreras' comical unease, and her "O vagabonda stella" is a showstopper. Alternately weeping and roaring his plight Attilio D'Orazi is a Michonnet by way of Scarpia. It's a tough, socko voice, but D'Orazi can strive for refinement too.

Indulging the leads with languid pacing, Gianfranco Masini and the NHK Symphony throw up a thick wall of sound early on, but Masini eventually moderates the output. The uncredited traditional production explores much about the opera, even finding a tender, quasi-erotic undertone to the banter between Adriana and Michonnet - the opera's real love story. It allows the divas' nocturnal catfight in Act II to take place in - for once - credible darkness. Home Vision's competing 1989 La Scala telecast is technically superior, with Gianandrea Gavazzeni's conducting more persuasive, but Mirella Freni's Adriana now looks coarse next to Caballe's, and the rest should be silence.

Copyright © 1995 The Metropolitan Opera Guild, Inc.