Fidelia
Puccini’s operas are among the most beloved and best-known works in the classical repertoire, but Edgar may be unknown even to aficionados, at least as it is presented here. This original four-act version of Edgar, first performed in 1889, was believed lost for over a century when Puccini’s granddaughter Simonetta discovered the score fully intact in 2008. In addition to the third act’s funeral music, which Arturo Toscanini conducted at Puccini’s funeral in 1924, listeners may recognize the duet from the now-restored fourth act, cut by Puccini in subsequent revisions of the work: it bears more than a passing similarity to the third-act duet in Tosca.
Puccini was always adamant in his preference for all three of the one-act operas that comprise Il trittico to be performed together. That’s how they are in this 2007 Modena production. From the start he had recognized the essential synergy of the brilliant contrasts of melodrama, sentiment and comedy when the trio is presented as an entity across a single evening. Many producers, daunted by a very long evening, made even longer by extended intervals necessary for the changing of very different sets, have been tempted into splitting and pairing them with other short operas. In this Modena production Amarilli Nizza appears in all three operas; as the faithless wife Giorgetta in Il tabarro, as Suor Angelica and as Gianni Schicchi’s daughter Lauretta. Alberto Mastromarino is the jealous husband, Michele in Il tabarro and as Gianni Schicchi.
Donna Elvira
Enrico Castiglione directs this 2001 production of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's seminal two-act 1787 dramma giocoso Don Giovanni, an opera mounted at Teatro Argentina in Rome, with musical accompaniment by the Rome Philharmonic Orchestra under the baton of Michael Halaz. The production includes arias by Renato Bruson, Luca Canonici, Amarilli Nizza, Rossana Potenza, Stefano de Peppo and Alessandro Battiato, Anna Laura Longo; Stefano Cucci serves as choir master. Mozart culled the by-now-familiar story from the legend of Don Juan, the world's most gifted lover. Nathan Southern, Rovi
