What more appropriate venue for Ildebrando Pizzetti’s operatic masterwork of 1958 “Assassinio nella Cattedrale” than the austere, Romanic Basilica di San Nicola in the southern Italian port city of Bari. A striking coincidence: the action of T. S. Eliot’s stage play “Murder in the Cathedral”, on which the opera is based, takes place in December 1170; the Basilica di San Nicola also dates from the 12th century and was consecrated in 1197… Pizzetti, one of Italy’s leading lyrical composers of the first half of the 20th century, composed several operas, of which “Assassinio nella Cattedrale” is one of his most famous. It unites all the elements of his lyrical style, such as a supple arioso treatment of the text that bears echoes of Debussy’s “Pelléas et Mélisande” as well as of Monteverdi and the Florentine monodists; and powerful, surging choral movements that are even more breathtaking when performed in a church. Pizzetti’s religiosity also manifests itself in his choice of T.S. Eliot’s modern-day miracle play about St. Thomas Becket, the Archbishop of Canterbury, who returns from a seven-year-exile only to be confronted by various torments, including Four Temptations; he succumbs to the fourth, the temptation of martyrdom… Internationally acclaimed bass-baritone Ruggero Raimondi, at home on all of the world’s major stages and unforgotten as Don Giovanni in Joseph Losey’s celebrated 1979 film, brings the firmness and authority of his vocal artistry to this role, elevating it to one of the most passionate and intriguing portrayals of a 20th-century operatic hero.