Word: puccini
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...Music by Puccini...
Student opera--the phrase is enough to unnerve the most stolid opera lover. Yet this year's Dunster House production of Puccini's Gianni Schicchi and La Rondine proves a delightful exception. With gratifyingly competent singing and acting illuminated by two stellar performances, the Dunster House production is a rare musical offering...
...operas were composed within two years of each other toward the end of Puccini's career, and both exemplify his talent for making characters and emotions emerge from a complex musical tissue of motivic patterns. These pieces show Puccini at his most delicate, working with subjects that demand greater lightness of touch than the tragic loves of his better-known operas. The duster House double-bill, put together by an all-student cast and production team, is full of talent and enthusiasm. Even if it misses some of Puccini's subtleties, it amply conveys the charm of two lesser-known...
...some 15 blocks north of the theater district, at the Metropolitan Opera House. It is one of the few places in the world that can offer truly grand productions of an art that thrives on bravura and artifice. This season the Met has two such extravaganzas, new productions of Puccini's Madama Butterfly and Verdi's Simon Boccanegra. Both look real enough to step into. Butterfly's fragile cottage is guarded by a line of sentinel iris standing in an authentic Japanese garden. The walls and ceiling of the doge's council chamber in Boccanegra, which opened in late January...
Wallace has furnished eclectic, listener-friendly music (allusions to Puccini's Tosca, which Milk attended the night before his death, abound), but he lacks the skill in building ensembles that would have made the end of Act I (the 1969 Stonewall riot) or Act II (a high-camp, dikes-on-trikes gay and lesbian rally) really stirring. His most effective work-in what surely is an operatic first-comes in the tender love duet for Harvey and his boyfriend, Scott Smith, sung while they lie in bed together...