Classical Music

Based on the play The Girl of the Golden West by the American author and Broadway impresario David Belasco, this live production from 1961 is notable for featuring Renata Tebaldi in the title role of Minnie, the take no guff saloon owner, a role that was considered among her defining ones and recorded during the prime of her voice. Also featuring noted Puccini and Verdi specialist, the baritone Giangiacomo Guelfi as the besottedly in love Sheriff Jack Rance, and tenor Daniele Barioni as Jack Johnson, the leader of the gang of bandits who steals Minnie's heart and catalyzes the story to it's melodramatic climax. With the Orchestra Sinfonica della Roma RAI conducted by Arturo Basile.

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Turandot, the late gem of Italian opera, is a celebration of the sounds and the mythical figures intimately associated with Chinese culture. The dramatic punch of the libretto inspired Giacomo Puccini to imagine a sound world of unusual splendor. The score is entrancing and unique, featuring original Chinese melodies, Asian pentatonic scales, and colorful orchestration with percussion writing that is strongly reminiscent of traditional Asian music. The NCPA’s production of this popular opera is a compelling feast for the senses. Chinese composer Hao Weiya gave this Turandot a new finale, performed for the first time in Beijing. In this captivating staging by director Chen Xinyi and under the musical direction of Daniel Oren an excellent cast offers a unique musical experience.

Opera Explained: Puccini - Madama Butterfly

Classical Music

Although one of his most consistently lyrical operas, La rondine remains one of Puccini' least known. Dissatisfied with the result of his work, Puccini wrote three versions, with two different endings, and continued to make further revisions up to h.

Based on stories by Henri Merger but also infused with the composer’s own experiences as a penniless graduate, Puccini’s powerful opera La Boheme portrays its youthful characters’ romantic outlook on life and the brutally tragic end to their innocence. The story is set around 1930 but director Orpha Phelan sees Puccini’s characters as equally at home in our times: “their story is universal, all that is needed is to understand what it is like to be young and in love!” This Malmo production was acclaimed in the Svenska Dagbladet as “one of the most moving renditions of Puccini’s opera I have ever seen.” In this production, we are in Paris. The wonderfully romantic city, made for falling in love. “Anyone who has been in Paris in a slushy winter knows there is nothing especially romantic about it!” Orpha Phelan states. She does not want to idealize bohemian life. “Nor is there anything particularly romantic about choking to death… in a poor, ugly, cold neighborhood… In the opera this misery is enacted against such oh-so-beautiful music. It’s that contrast that makes the opera great.”

Puccini's version of Manon Lescaut was first mounted at the Teatro Regio in Turin on 1st February 1893, the year and month of the first production of Verdi's Falstaff in Milan. The opera proved an immediate success. It was staged at Covent Garden and at the Grand Opera House of Philadelphia the following year. There were subsequent revisions and temporary changes, with alterations in orchestration suggested by Toscanini for performances at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, these last incorporated in the later published score. The libretto itself, effective enough, in spite of its multiple authorship, offers certain problems, not least in the omission of the original second act suggested by Praga and Oliva and set in the Paris apartment of Des Grieux, although what has happened in the interval between the present first and second acts is quickly apparent.

Puccini: Madama Butterfly (Highlights)

Puccini: La Bohème (Highlights)

Puccini: Tosca (Highlights)