Olivieri Ravelli

This entry in the Italian crime film cycle of the '70s presents an interesting take on the format. Emergency Squad seems unusually postmodern for its time because it places an equal amount of dramatic focus on its hero and its villain. The hero part is fulfilled by Ravelli (Tomas Milian), a cop consumed with the desire to get revenge on the crook who shot his wife to death during a robbery. The crook in question is Marseilles (Gastone Moschin), who is trying to assemble funds for his own retirement. As the revenge scenario moves toward the inevitable confrontation, Emergency Squad retains interest because it paints both leads in a complex fashion – Ravelli's obsessive quest makes him as scary as he is sympathetic and the seemingly icy Marseilles reveals some surprisingly vulnerable sides to his character.

On 7th February 1857, after a delay of one year due to problems of copyright on a possible production of King Lear, Verdi accepted and signed a new agreement with the Teatro di San Carlo of Naples for an opera to be staged in January or February 1858. Not long after he had put behind the experiences of Simon Boccanegra (June 1857) and Aroldo (August), Verdi, then, had to face the issue of a new subject for Naples, which would no longer be King Lear, discarded for various reasons, and not even El tesorero del Rey by António García Gutiérrez or Ruy Blas by Hugo, to which he had given more serious thought, but Gustave III by Eugène Scribe, a play written in 1833 for Daniel Auber in which the king of Sweden is assassinated, in 1792, by a group of noblemen led by Jacob Ankarström. The composition of the score, between October 1857 and January 1858, went hand in hand with Verdi’s complex relationship with the Neapolitan censors, who would end up distorting the libretto and unnerving the composer to the point that he ended up refusing to stage the opera and breaking his agreement with the theatre.

The musical notes of this Puccini masterpiece provide the starting point and foundation for a new, highly successful collaboration between Riccardo Chailly and Davide Livermore. In their interpretation, there is “no moment, no movement, that goes against the musical meaning” (R. Chailly). The result is an energetic, authentic, and atmospherically strong Bohème, “in which every sacred phrase receives its own orchestral colour, its own dynamic and its own expression.” (Corriere della Sera)