Word: manon
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Massenet's Manon is a French opera of more refined and delicate charms than Puccini's booming, Italianate Manon Lescaut, although both are based on the same Abbé Prevost novel. It is a big opera, but for best effect it needs a production with the intimacy of opéra comique-one reason it has never been much more than a singers' showpiece at the Metropolitan (last performance: 1948). Last week, as the only new production of the New York City Opera's spring season, Massenet's Manon got the kind of performance...
...comparatively compact City Center Theater, Stage Director José Ruben, veteran of both opera and Broadway (and once Sarah Bernhardt's leading man), made Manon move through all its five acts with proper sentiment and subtlety. In the pit, French Conductor Jean Morel kept the pace clean and precise. And the singing, French diction included, of City Opera's young Americans could hardly have been better...
...Angeles-born Soprano Ann Ayars looked and sounded well in the part of the loving, pleasure-mad, 18th Century Manon. What she lacked in artfulness, her gallant and unhappy lover made up in charm and ardor. As the Chevalier des Grieux, young (27) Philadelphia-born Tenor David Poleri turned out to be one of the finds of the season. Laszlo Halasz, director of City Opera, heard Poleri last fall on a Chicago radio show. Handsome Poleri sang Des Grieux as if he had learned it straight from Caruso; his voice, less powerful and assured, is sweeter, lighter in color...
...second month at the Little Cine Met, Sixth at 39th, Manon features Cecile Aubry and a fairly clumsy modernization of the French classic, Manon Lescaut...
Metropolitan Opera (Sat. 2 p.m., ABC). Manon Lescaut, with Dorothy Kirsten and Richard Tucker...