Word: zandonai
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...stages Zandonai's Francesca da Rimini...
Last week the Metropolitan Opera offered a few clues as it staged a new production of Riccardo Zandonai's hot-blooded thriller Francesca da Rimini. First performed in 1914, Francesca was one of a number of works that attempted to transcend romantically the naturalistic action of verismo, using the more advanced harmonic language and orchestral technique of Wagner to create a new direction for opera. In La Fanciulla del West (1910), Puccini had pointed the way, and several younger men were eager to inherit his mantle: Italo Montemezzi, with L'Amore del Tre Re (1913); Ildebrando Pizzetti, with...
...Zandonai's failure was primarily due to the lack of a strong individual style. For all its harmonic piquancies and orchestral sleight of hand, the score of Francesca sounds derivative-a touch of Puccini, a sprinkle of Debussy, a pinch of Wagner. Further, it lacks a single memorable melody, the essential ingredient that keeps a relic like Francesco Cilea's Adriana Lecouvreur on the boards. Its plot, however, is operatic gold. Based on a play by Gabriele d'Annunzio, it recounts an episode from Dante's Inferno. Francesca (Soprano Renata Scotto) is tricked into marrying...
...VIII not only had six wives but he was also an enthusiastic composer. One of his love songs appropriately titled Helas, Madame, will be performed in New York this week by a group known as Pro Musica Antiqua. The royal composer is only one of hundreds from Albeniz to Zandonai whose works are heard in New York every season in dozens of little halls and auditoriums far from Carnegie Hall and the Met. There out-of-the-way music groups, both amateur and professional, are giving Manhattan the kind of musical excitement that the booming off-Broadway theater has brought...
...second to none in discovering and importing good foreign singers.*Last week it pulled a double coup, gave U.S. listeners their first chance to hear famed Bulgarian Basso Boris Christoff and beauteous Turkish Soprano Leyla Gencer. Gencer, loved at first sight, was the modest and moving star of Zandonai's rarely heard Francesco, da Rimini; Christoff, playing his temperament to the hilt, was almost the ruination of Boris Godunov...