Reviews
Fitting portrait puts Puccini in fine focusOPERA THE PUCCINI STORY Melbourne City Opera Melba Hall, September 19-21 John Slavin Reviewer The Age, 23/9/2008 ADVISING a potential librettist for one of his operas Giacomo Puccini demanded: "Write something that will make the world to weep." His operas were taken at the time to be examples of a new realistic style that he shared with Mascagni and Leoncavallo. But Puccini's music emphasises the melodramatic opportunities of the text to such effect that the result is a form of nervous electricity that arouses the emotions. This experience familiar to opera lovers is a musical gloss on psycho-pathetic relationships, particularly sadism. More than any other composer, Puccini punished his heroines. The casualty list is extensive and impressive. Something of this ambiguous quality haunted Joseph Talia's celebration of the composer's 150th birthday for Melbourne City Opera. Talia's take is that Puccini began as a bohemian and remained so all his life. But the narrative and the photographs that accompanied the biography suggested a flaneur, while the stories of his relationship with his formidable wife, Elvira, and the affairs he had with married women, could have come from a composite of his operas. There were few surprises in the choice of arias, which, given Puccini's immense popularity, is not surprising. The audience was there for the music and not for a display of vocal distinction. Unfortunately, the orchestra under Patrick Miller frequently wobbled into thin sound. Among the large cast of singers, Mylinda Joyce struck the right plaintive note in the role of La Boheme's Mimi. The result was an admirable if not complex portrait of personal and musical development in which the operatic achievement was speedily laid out. |