Alfredo Silipigni (left) & Lando Bartolini (right)

Italian verismo (realistic or, better, hyper-realistic) composer Umberto Giordano (1867-1948) secured his work’s place in opera’s regular repertory with “Andrea Chénier” and “Fedora.” Adding to local listeners’ experience with the composer’s oeuvre, Teatro Grattacielo, which has concentrated its efforts on one concert performance of a late 19^th or early 20^th Century rarity per season since 1997, offered “La Cena delle Beffe” (1924) at Alice Tully Hall on November 20. For his penultimate one of a dozen operas, Giordano cloaked a terse, violent tale of revenge, treachery and fratricide in a no-holds-barred, often opulent score, played here, under Alfredo Silipigni’s baton, mostly at a relentlessly high decibel level. This presented an almost insurmountable challenge to the singers, who were heard to their best advantage in the rare quieter moments of the work.

“La Cena delle Beffe” (“The Jesters’ Feast”), after a play by Sem Benelli (1877-1949) had its world premiere at La Scala, Milan, conducted by Arturo Toscanini, with Hipólito Lázaro and Carmen Melis. It reached the Metropolitan Opera two years later, led by Tullio Serafin, with Beniamino Gigli, Frances Alda and Titta Ruffo, later Lawrence Tibbett, and was played in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Philadelphia and Cleveland a total of 12 times during two seasons. If Fiora, in Italo Montemezzi and Benelli’s “L’Amore di Tre Re,” boasts the love of three kings, the best the courtesan Ginevra here seems to achieve is the love of three scoundrels. These are Giannetto Malespini and his rivals, the brothers Neri and Gabriello Chiaramantesi, who slashed him in some decorously unspecified “delicate spot” (“morbido”) and twice threw him in the river Arno. The setting is Firenze during the reign of the ruthless and powerful Medici family.

Before the public three decades, tenor Lamberto Bartolini, who triumphed last autumn in the demanding title role of Pietro Mascagni’s “Guglielmo Ratcliff,” proved less happy with the higher tessitura and dramatic music of Giannetto when pitted against an orchestral complement playing at full tilt. More ingratiating than his furious first and third act solos, “Calato in Arno e pugnalato poi!” (“Thrown in the Arno and then stabbed”) and “Non è la vita un gioco con la morte?” (“Isn’t life a game with death?”), was his contribution to a dulcet duet with Michele Capalbo, possessing a colorful soprano spinto (i.e. between lyric and dramatic), as Ginevra, about the night they have just spent together. Capalbo’s solo moment to shine was in a gentle aria in Act Four, some of it accompanied by celesta, when being adorned and coifed for the evening.

In a lyrically ringing, almost sprightly third act ensemble, Giannetto confronts his tightly bound (“legato bene”) prisoner Neri (baritone Patryk Wroblewski) with his enemies, including his spurned loves (sung by Tracy Rhodus, Maria Zifchak and Kimiko Hata). His voice too light for most of his assignment, including an irreverent drinking song, Wroblewski was at his best in a romantic duet with sweet-sounding high soprano Rhodus, as Lisabetta, who still loves Neri, which then became a trio with Giannetto, and in the opera’s quietly poignant final moments. Here, Neri’s erstwhile feigned insanity gave way to actual loss of his senses when he learned he had slain Gabriello (tenor John Pickle) in Ginevra’s bed, mistaking him in the dark for his foe, Giannetto. Pickle’s star turn came not as Gabriello, but as the unnamed singer of a soft serenade, primarily mandolin-accompanied, with the feeling of Mozart’s Don Giovanni’s “Deh vieni alla finestra” or a Neapolitan song.

There was a rousing quartet in Act One, for Ginevra and the three men who have loved her. Contrasting orchestral passages in Act Four merit mention. The first was a sweeping, impassioned prelude. The next were outbursts, with all the intensity of the accompaniment to Klytemnestra’s offstage murder in Strauss’ “Elektra,” as Neri wielded his dagger and a vindictive Giannetto, in the spirit—and words—of Azucena, in Verdi’s “ Il Trovatore,” informed a stunned, horrified Neri that he had killed his own brother.

Lawrence Long, John Easterlin, Matthew Lau, Daniel (Ihn-Kyu) Lee and Luis Emilio Cabrera completed the cast.

Grattacielo has planned Ottorino Respighi’s 1921 “La Bella Dormente nel Bosco” (“Sleeping Beauty”) for next November at Tully Hall, with Vittorio Gnecchi’s “Cassandra,” Respighi’s “Maria Vittoria,” Giordano’s “Siberia” and Mascagni’s “ Piccolo Marat” possibly to follow at later dates.

Alice Tully Hall, Lincoln Center

Tickets $25, 40 & 65 through CenterCharge 212/721-6500