Stravinsky: Petrouchka, Temirkanov/Leningrad PO

This is my post from this week's Tuesday Blog.

To celebrate Mardi Gras, Vinyl’s Revenge has lined up a complete performance of Igor Stravinsky’s ballet Pétrouchka (or often in English, Petrushka).

Shrove Tuesday is the day preceding Ash Wednesday (the first day of Lent), which is celebrated in some countries by consuming pancakes. In others, especially those where it is called Mardi Gras or some translation thereof, this is a carnival day, and also the last day of "fat eating" or "gorging" before the fasting period of Lent.

Pétrouchka tells the story of the loves and jealousies of three puppets. The three are brought to life by the Charlatan during the 1830 Shrovetide Fair (which we would equate to Shrove Tuesday or Mardi Gras) in Saint Petersburg, Russia.

Petrushka loves the Ballerina, but she rejects him. She prefers the Moor. Petrushka is angry and hurt, and challenges the Moor. The Moor kills him with his scimitar. Petrushka's ghost rises above the puppet theatre as night falls. He shakes his fist at the Charlatan, then collapses in a second death.

Petrushka brings music, dance, and design together in a unified whole. It is one of the most popular of the Ballets Russes productions. It is usually performed today using the original designs (by Alexandre Benois) and choreography (by Michel Fokine). As we have discussed in these pages before, not all ballet music manages to “stand alone” as a concert piece without choreography. However, for he most part, all of Stravinsky’s ballets manage to do just that, and are often programmed as complete works rather than as suites of highlights.

Two versions of the ballet are often performed – and have their own discographies: the original score dating 1911 and a revision in 1947. Compared to the 1911 version, the 1947 version requires one less flute; two fewer oboes, but a dedicated cor anglais player instead of one doubled by the fourth oboe; two fewer bassoons, but a dedicated contrabassoon; neither of the two cornets, but an additional trumpet; one less snare drum and no tenor drum, thus removing the offstage instruments; no glockenspiel; and one less harp.

Stravinsky was a known “tinkerer”, and so there are some subtle “tweaks” to the overall score in the 1947 version, which Stravinsky used in his seminal series of own recordings in the early 1960’s.

The performance I retained today, from my old vinyl collection, is a late-Soviet era recording from their flagship Melodiya label (reissued under the Quintessence label in the West) featuring the orchestra then-known as the Leningrad Philharmonic. Initially known as the "Imperial Music Choir" (and performing privately for the court of Alexander III of Russia), the Saint Petersburg Philharmonic Orchestra was formed in 1882 and is Russia's oldest symphony orchestra. The orchestra gained its most fame under the lengthy directorship of Yevgeny Mravinsky. The orchestra made few tours to the West - the first was to Finland in spring 1946 - but it recorded a number of studio and live recordings under Mravinsky. In 1991 the orchestra gained its current name after its home city returned to its original name of Saint Petersburg. Today it is an internationally recognized symphony orchestra under the directorship of Yuri Temirkanov (who took over for Mravinsky in 1988).

Enjoy!

Igor STRAVINSKY (1882-1971)
Pétrouchka (Russian: Петрушка), Burlesque Scenes in Four Tableaux (1910-11, rev. 1947)

Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra
Yuri Temirkanov, conducting

Label - Quintessence (Melodiya) STEREO (1975)
Catalog # PMC-7147

Internet Archive URL - https://archive.org/details/StravinskyPetrouchka1911Rev.
Thanks to seriosos seriosos 

If you care to compare, YouTube hosts this performance of the original 1911 version, performed by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra under Oskar Danon: 

Baroque Showcase

No. 241 of the ongoing ITYWLTMT series of audio montages can be found in our archives at https://archive.org/details/pcast241

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Over the years, we’ve assembled many thematic montages, but few of them have been dedicated at sampling works of a musical period. We could point to our Skandalkonzert montage from last fall as being one of the few we’ve shared with music indicative of a specific composition period. As we build up some material for Project 366, don’t be surprised if we program some more of these.

Early music, the era when composers start codifying music rather than relying on aural tradition, encapsulates mainly two musical periods – the renaissance and the baroque.  According to Wikipedia, Baroque music applies to music composed from approximately 1600 to 1750. Baroque music forms a major portion of the "classical music" canon, being widely studied, performed, and listened to. Key composers of the Baroque era include Johann Sebastian Bach, Antonio Vivaldi, George Frideric Handel, and many, many others.  Today’s montage avoids the composers we’ve often programmed in past montages (such as the three preceding ones) and provides a modest sampling of compositions by other baroque-era composers. Without necessarily going into the specific works and artists showcased today, I thought I’d give a quick bio of each of the composers featured this week.

Johann Pachelbel (1653 –1706) was a German composer, organist, and teacher who brought the south German organ tradition to its peak. He composed a large body of sacred and secular music, and his contributions to the development of the chorale prelude and fugue have earned him a place among the most important composers of the middle Baroque era. Pachelbel's Canon in D major, is paired in today’s montage as originally intended with a gigue in the same key. One of the most recognized and famous baroque compositions, it has in recent years become extremely popular for use in weddings, rivalling Wagner's Bridal Chorus. Despite its centuries-old heritage, because the Canon's chord progression has been used widely in pop music in the 20th and 21st centuries it has been called "almost the godfather of pop music".

Georg Philipp Telemann (1681 –1767) is another German Baroque composer and multi-instrumentalist. Almost completely self-taught in music, Telemann entered the University of Leipzig to study law, but eventually settled on a career in music. He held important positions in Leipzig, Sorau, Eisenach, and Frankfurt before settling in Hamburg in 1721, where he became musical director of the city's five main churches. Telemann was compared favorably both to his friend Johann Sebastian Bach, who made Telemann the godfather and namesake of his son Carl Philipp Emanuel, and to George Frideric Handel, whom Telemann also knew personally. Telemann's music incorporates several national styles (French, Italian) and is even at times influenced by Polish popular music. He remained at the forefront of all new musical tendencies and his music is an important link between the late Baroque and early Classical styles.

Jean-Philippe Rameau (1683 –1764) was one of the most important French composers and music theorists of the Baroque era, and is also considered the leading French composer for the harpsichord of his time, alongside François Couperin. Little is known about Rameau's early years, and it was not until the 1720s that he won fame as a major theorist of music with his Treatise on Harmony (1722) and also in the following years as a composer of masterpieces for the harpsichord, which circulated throughout Europe. Nicolas Racot de Grandval (1676 - 1753) was also a French composer, harpsichordist and playwright. Although a respectable musician, at one time organist at St Eustache, his interests ran more to comedy, both in written comic dramas, such as the "Broken bed pot" and in musical comedy such as frivolous parodies on Clérambault's cantatas.

Giovanni Battista Draghi (1710 –1736), best known as Pergolesi was an Italian composer, violinist and organist. He studied music in Jesi before going to Naples in 1725, where he studied under Gaetano Greco and Francesco Feo among others. He spent most of his brief life working for aristocratic patrons like the Colonna principe di Stigliano, and duca Marzio IV Maddaloni Carafa. Pergolesi was one of the most important early composers of opera buffa. His Il prigionier superbo, contained the two-act buffa intermezzo, La serva padrona (The Servant Mistress), which became a very popular work in its own right. When it was performed in Paris in 1752, it prompted the so-called Querelle des Bouffons ("quarrel of the comic actors") between supporters of serious French opera by the likes of Jean-Baptiste Lully and Jean-Philippe Rameau and supporters of new Italian comic opera. Pergolesi was held up as a model of the Italian style during this quarrel, which divided Paris's musical community for two years.

Francesco Saverio Geminiani (1687 –1762) was an Italian violinist, composer, and music theorist. He received lessons in music from Alessandro Scarlatti, and studied the violin under Carlo Ambrogio Lonati and Arcangelo Corelli. After leading orchestras in Italy, he set off for London in the company of Francesco Barsanti, where he arrived with the reputation of a virtuoso violinist, and soon attracted attention and patrons, including William Capel, 3rd Earl of Essex, who remained a consistent patron. In 1715 Geminiani played his violin concerti for the court of George I, with Handel at the keyboard. Geminiani made a living by teaching and writing music; many of his students went on to have successful careers, such as Charles Avison, Matthew Dubourg, Michael Christian Festing, Bernhard Joachim Hagen and Cecilia Young.

I think you will love this music too!

Project 366 - Themes and Variations

To mark the fifth anniversary of ITYWLTMT, we are undertaking a long-term project that will introduce - and re-introduce - musical selections in the context of a larger thematic arc I am calling "A Journey of Musical Discovery". Read more here.

This month’s installment of Project 366 is another stand-alone theme with illustrations, this one dusting up a thematic arc from January 2014.

The Oldest Trick in the Book

In one of our earliest chapters, we talked about sonatas, and introduced the general concept of musical form – that is to say, the “method behind the madness” of organizing a piece of music. Forms can be very strict (the sonata form, or three-part form is a good example of that), and others can be less rigid, but form is after all form, and there has to be a set of “simple rules” that allow us to build a piece (or recognize how a piece is built). In his famous Omnibus television lecture on Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, Leonard Bernstein talked about form as “a mold of Jell-O”.

One example if a popular musical form is the “theme and variations”. In its simplest manifestation, a musical theme is “exposed” and is repeated in altered form or accompanied in a different manner through a set of variations “developed” from that theme. T & V structure generally begins with a theme (which is itself sometimes preceded by an introduction), typically between eight and thirty-two bars in length; each variation, particularly in music of the eighteenth century and earlier, will be of the same length and structure as the theme.

The basic principle of beginning with simple variations and moving on to more elaborate ones has always been present in the history of the variation form, since it provides a way of giving an overall shape to a variation set, rather than letting it just form an arbitrary sequence. In a way, this form may in part have derived from the practical inventiveness of musicians.

According to a fine article in Wikipedia, works in T & V form first emerge in the early sixteenth century. Keyboard works in variation form were written by a number of 16th-century English composers, including William Byrd, Hugh Aston and Giles Farnaby. Outstanding examples of early Baroque variations are the "ciaccone" of Claudio Monteverdi and Heinrich Schütz] Two famous variation sets from the Baroque era, both originally written for harpsichord, are George Frideric Handel's The Harmonious Blacksmith set, and Johann Sebastian Bach's Goldberg Variations.

In the Classical era, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart wrote a great number of variations, such as the first movement of his Piano Sonata in A, K. 331, or the finale of his Clarinet Quintet. Joseph Haydn specialized in sets of double variations, in which two related themes, usually minor and major, are presented and then varied in alternation; outstanding examples are the slow movement of his Symphony No. 103, the Drumroll, and the Variations in F minor for piano, H XVII:6.

Musicians of the Classical era also could improvise variations; both Mozart and Beethoven made powerful impressions on their audiences when they improvised. Modern listeners can get a sense of what these improvised variations sounded like by listening to published works that evidently are written transcriptions of improvised performances, in particular Beethoven's Fantasia in G Minor, Op. 77, and Mozart's Variations on an Aria by Gluck, K. 455. Beethoven wrote many variation sets in his career. Some were independent sets, for instance the Diabelli Variations, and the Eroica Variations . Others form single movements or parts of movements in larger works, such as the variations in the final movement of the Third Symphony (Eroica).

We could continue the list through the Romantic (Chopin and Mendelssohn) and the Late Romantic (Johannes Brahms). Variation sets have also been composed by notable twentieth-century composers, including Sergei Rachmaninov (Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, and his variations for solo piano on themes by Chopin and Corelli), Charles Ives (Variations on "America"), Arnold Schoenberg (Theme and Variations, Opp. 43a and 43b), and the list goes on…

A significant sub-set of the above consists of variations on a theme by another composer – Brahms’s variations on themes by Haydn and Paganini, Chopin, Liszt and many others based on operatic arias by Mozart and others, the list can go on for pages!

Your Listener Guides

Listener Guide #77 “TDMH June 1954”. Taken from the broadcast archives of the CBC, Glenn Gould performs the Goldberg Variations and other Bach favourites (ITYWLTMT Podcast # 161 - 20 June 2014)

Listener Guide #78 – “Tchaikovsjy Suites nos. 3 and 4”. From my vinyl collection, a pair of recordings of Tchaikovsky Orchestral; Suites, both with elaborate Theme and Variation movements (Vinyl’s Revenge # 24 - 3 Jan 2017)

Listener Guide #79 – “Theme and Variations: Paganini Edition”. Rachmaninov, Brahms and Liszt use themes by Paganini in elaborate T & V works. (ITYWLTMT Podcast # 137 - 3 Jan 2014)

Listener Guide #80 – “Variations on a Song”. “Twinkle Twinlkle Little Star”, “The Carnival of Venice” and :”I Got Rhythm” are example of songs that get the T & V treatment in this montage. (ITYWLTMT Podcast # 139 - 17 Jan 2014)

Listener Guide #81 – “Variations for Orchestra”. A set of works for orchestra that exploit the T & V form by Elgar and Britten among others (ITYWLTMT Podcast #131 - 31 Jan 2014)

Tchaikovsky Lost and Found

This is my post from this week's Tuesday Blog.

New Series: Cover 2 Cover

As my personal cache of downloads from old sites slowly diminishes, I plan to “spread out” my contributions to the Once Upon the Internet Series, making them bi-monthly. To fill the void, I am launching today a new series of posts which I am calling Cover 2 Cover, where I will be sharing complete albums which I have encountered during my mining activities. The primary source for these albums is a resource we all exploit, YouTube.

I’ve shared “complete albums” from YouTube before in my Vinyl’s Revenge series, but in those instances, these are albums of a certain vintage that I have in my vinyl collection. These new finds don’t necessarily fit that mold. Though most of the ones I have been planning for this series are “vintage”, there are a few that are more recent – these have been on the “open market” for a while, so at the very least I take that as a sign that the material is viewed as “good promotion” by their rightful owners.

(I don’t exclude contributing “vintage” material to YouTube myself outside of my vinyl oldies in the future, but I haven’t lined up anything in that vein, at least not yet.)

Tchaikovsky Reconstructions

For my first post in the Cover 2 Cover series, I have assembled tracks from a 2 CD Philips set of Tchaikovsky reissues titled “Complete Tone Poems”. This compilation contains eight works, but today’s feature focuses on three works in particular, which I have packaged along with a “filler” track for the purpose of this post. In the future (later this year, maybe next), I plan to bring the remaining tracks for a second post.

Whenever I prepare posts on Tchaikovsky, my first stop is the excellent site Tchaikovsky Research, a well-constructed wiki site that covers all-things Tchaikovsky. When we read details on opp. 76, 77 and 78, we can see a definite pattern in the site’s contents. It goes something like this:

After the first performance the composer destroyed the full score, but after his death it was reconstructed from the surviving orchestral parts and published [posthumously]

Fatum was written between September and December 1868 and titled as a “Symphonic Fantasy”. Though the composer didn’t provide a “back story” or a program describing the music, the concert notes at the Moscow premiere included these verses by Konstantin Batyushkov:

Do you recall the cry
Of gray Melchizedek as he prepared to die?
Man, he exclaimed, is born a slave; a slave
He must descend into the grave
And Death will hardly tell him why
He haunts the magic vale of tears,
Suffers and weeps, endures and disappears.

After the concert, Tchaikovsky told his brother Anatoly: "This is, I think, the best thing I have written to date—at least, so others say (a significant success)". The St-Petersburg premiere, conducted by Balakirev, didn’t go so well; the surviving correspondence between Balakirev and Tchaikovsky relating to Fatum and its performance contain critiques of the work, of which the one with the most unfavourable judgement was not sent to Tchaikovsky .This may explain why the work was destroyed, and reconstructed posthumously.

The symphonic ballad The Voyevoda is based on Aleksandr Pushkin's Russian translation of the Polish poem The Ambush: A Ukrainian Ballad by Adam Mickiewicz. The work is unconnected to Tchaikovsky's first opera, also called The Voyevoda (1867-68), or the melodrama he wrote for the stage play of the same name in 1886. In a letter to Pyotr Jurgenson, Tchaikovsky reported: "I shall now orchestrate the fantasia Voyevoda (on the subject of Pushkin's ballad), and will play it for the first time in Saint Petersburg at a concert of the Musical Society. I have been invited to conduct one of their concerts there". The scoring of the ballad was completed in September/October 1891. After hearing his new work played by the orchestra, Tchaikovsky became extremely dissatisfied, and the next day he destroyed it.: "My ballad The Voyevoda turned out to be so wretched, that the other day after the concert I tore it to shreds. It exists no more".

The third posthumous work programmed today is Tchaikovsky's first significant orchestral work, the overture to Aleksandr Ostrovsky's drama The Storm. Russian music and literary critic Herman Laroche later recalled:

In the summer of 1864, Pyotr Ilyich had to write a large overture, for which he chose himself the programme of Ostrovsky's The Storm. The orchestra he employed was ‘heretical', with bass tuba, English Horn. harp, tremolo and divided strings, bass drum and cymbals. He was probably optimistic in nurturing the hope that the requirements of the programme would exempt him from any punishment for failing to follow the usual guidelines. In any event, by the start of term, or perhaps somewhat earlier, he finished his work. I cannot recall the reason now, but he asked me to stand in for him, and sent me the score by post with a message to show it to Anton Grigoryevich. A few days later, Rubinstein told me to come and listen to his judgement. Never in my life did I receive such a dressing-down for my misdemeanours as on that day (as I recall, it was a beautiful Sunday morning), listening on behalf of someone else.

The overture was never performed during the composer's lifetime; it was heard for the first time only in 1896 at Mitrofan Belyayev's third Russian Symphony Concert in Saint Petersburg, conducted by Aleksandr Glazunov.

It’s interesting to listen to these works in the context of Francesca da Rimini, a like-minded, programmatic Tchaikovsky repertoire mainstay.

Happy Listening

Pyotr Ilyich TCHAIKOVSKY (1840-1893)
The Storm, Op. 76 [TH 36]
Fatum, Op. 77 [TH 41]
The voyevoda, Op. 78 [TH 54]
Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra
Eliahu Inbal, conducting

Francesca da Rimini, Op. 32 [TH 46]
New Philharmonia Orchestra
Igor Markevitch, conducting

 

Internet Archive URL - https://archive.org/details/04TchaikovskyFrancescaDaRimi

Complete CD (8 tracks) - https://www.youtube.com/playlist?lis...m8jgnQg05sPU_c

Viola and Orchestra

No. 240 of the ongoing  ITYWLTMT series series series of audio montages can be found in our archives at https://archive.org/details/pcast240

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This week’s Blog and Podcast consider a trio of works intended for viola soloist and orchestra. The viola is, after all, the violin’s richer and mellower toned sibling yet its repertoire as a solo instrument is rather modest when compared to its little brother.

Some composers have written works for both instruments; Sir William Walton for example has composed concertos for both the violin and the viola. In a not-too-surprising twist of events, some well-known violiniss like Pinchas Zukerman, are established at playing either instrument as soloist, a trend that has included among others Maxim Vengerov and James Ehnes.

Sir William’s viola concerto did not make the cut this week, but we are reminded of the fact Paul Hindemith, himself a violist, premiered the work on 3 October 1929. Years later, on 19 January 1936, Hindemith travelled to London, intending to play his own viola concerto with the BBC Symphony Orchestra. However, just before midnight on 20 January, King George V died. The concert was cancelled, but event organizers still wanted Hindemith's involvement in any music that was broadcast in its place.

Unable to agree on a suitable replacement piece, Hindemith took on the challenge of writing an entirely new piece - the following day, from 11 am to 5 pm, Hindemith sat in a BBC office and wrote Trauermusik from scratch (in all fairness, the work does borrow some material from his Marthis der Maler symphony and the afore-mentioned viola concerto), in homage to the late king. It was written for viola and string orchestra and was performed that evening in a live broadcast from a BBC radio studio, with Sir Adrian Boult conducting and the composer as soloist.

The Swiss philanthropist and music patron Werner Reinhart later told Gertrud Hindemith "there was something Mozartian" about her husband’s writing Trauermusik in half a day, and premiering it the same day. "I know no one else today who could do that", he said.

The large work featured in today’s podcast was written by Hector Berlioz for another rather famous violinist who enjoyed playing the viola: Niccolò Paganini. The two first met in1833, three years after the premiere of Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique. Paganini had acquired a superb viola, a Stradivarius—"But I have no suitable music. Would you like to write a solo for viola? You are the only one I can trust for this task."

When Paganini saw early sketches of the piece - Harold in Italy after Childe Harold's Pilgrimage by Lord Byron - with all the rests in the viola part, he told Berlioz it would not do, and that he expected to be playing continuously. They then parted, with Paganini disappointed. Harold was premiered on 23 November 1834 to much acclaim. Nearly four years later; Paganini finally heard the work he had commissioned; he was so overwhelmed by it that, following the performance, he dragged Berlioz onto the stage and there knelt and kissed his hand before a wildly cheering audience and applauding musicians In the version I programmed today, the viola soloist is Mr. Zukerman.

To complete the podcast, I chose James Ehnes (playing the viola) in a “potpourri” for viola and orchestra by Johann Nepomuk Hummel.

I think you will love this music too! 

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Prompted by a contest this month on Pod-O-Matic, I have decided to add TWITTER to our social media platforms. I don't know if this will be an enduring presence or just something I am trying out, depends on how much traction we get.

Our address is https://twitter.com/itywltmt

Our handle is @itywltmt

Il Trittico, Revisited

This is my post from this week's Once or Twice a Fortnight.

For those of you who have followed this series over the last five years, you will notice that Puccini’s Trittico was the subject of a four-part series of posts in November-December 2012. Why, when there is so much material to choose from, would I revisit a past topic?

To answer this question, let me begin by pointing to Project 366, a long-term project on my blog that explores the Western Repertoire. In gathering material for this project, I have been reviewing a lot of my past posts – here and elsewhere – as well as my music archive, ensuring that there are musical artifacts available to illustrate all of the topics covered in that project.

It should come as no surprise to those of us who leverage YouTube as a music library that material comes and goes without much notice, and in that sense my music archive plays a pivotal role in my endeavours, ensuring a dependable source of musical material. (In short, if the Internet Archive were to shut down, I would be in deep doo-doo!)

The March installment of my project will be entitled The Trifecta, where I will propose materials that “comes in threes”, and Puccini’s opera is an obvious “fit”. After reviewing my past posts on OTF discussing the triptych, I made the decision to future-proof the performances, as my YouTube links have come and gone. Thankfully, one of the three one-act operas, Gianni Schicchi, already was in my music archive, and over the years I managed to acquire the remaining two segments from the same overall performance, the Decca Trittico featuring soprano Renata Tebaldi (More on that later).

About the Opera

A triptych is a work of art (usually a panel painting) that is divided into three sections, or three carved panels that are hinged together and can be folded shut or displayed open. (I wonder if the old Mad Magazine back-page fold-in qualifies as a triptych…)

The middle panel is typically the largest and it is flanked by two smaller related works, although there are triptychs of equal-sized panels.

The Garden of Earthly Delights - Hieronymus Bosch (ca. 1500)

Puccini’s triptych isn’t necessarily an exploration of that art form in the rigid sense, though it did start off that way – Puccini wanted to write a trio of one-act operas that each reflected one of the parts of Dante's Divine Comedy. Ultimately, the opera deviated from that premise, though its final act, Schicchi, is based on Dante’s epic poem.

I think of Il Trittico more as an intense study of the Verismo style. The key ingredients of Verismo involve believable situations with often tragic twists of fate and Puccini’s trio of subjects fit the mold to a “T”. In Il tabarro, set in contemporary Paris, the Deus ex machina moment comes when Michele opens his opulent overcoat to Giorgetta’s horror; in Suor Angelica, it is both her terrorized realization that suicide will prevent a heavenly reunion with her child, followed by an 11^th-hour intervention from a divine source that will ensure that ultimate reunion. Finally, Schicchi turns the tables on greedy relatives, making himself the sole heir of Donati’s fortune, and his “eyes wide open” affirmation that he knows he will be condemned to Hell for his dirty trick but was there a better way of making sure that wealth would be well spent?

Originally released in 1962, our musical shares come from the complete Trittico overseen by the Swedish conductor of Italian birth, Lamberto Gardelli conducting the Orchestra and Chorus of the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino. The operas feature Italian singers in all the roles – notably Miss Tebaldi in all three acts. The exception is Robert Merrill who sings Michele in Il tabarro. Fernando Corena, who sings the all-important title role in Gianni Schicchi, was born in Geneva to an Italian mother and a Turkish father - thus he was at least half-Italian

From a recording technology perspective, only Schicchi was recorded in stereo. They still sound excellent. As is often the case in our musical shares of opera, I snapped these from Capital Public Radio podcasts, and I included Sean Bianco’s spoken introductions to all three acts.

Giacomo PUCCINI (1858-1924)
Il trittico (The Triptych, 1918)
A collection of three one-act operas
Orchestra e coro del Maggio Musicale Fiorentino
Lamberto Gardelli, conducting
Discogs URL - https://www.discogs.com/Tebaldi-Simi...elease/5209162

Act One: Il Tabarro [Original OTF Post]
Italian libretto by Giuseppe Adami

Synopsis and Libretto – http://www.opera-arias.com/puccini/il-tabarro/


Act Two – Suor Angelica [Original OTF Post]
Italian libretto by Giovacchino Forzano

Synopsis and Libretto – http://www.opera-arias.com/puccini/suor-angelica/


Act Three – Gianni Schcchi [Original OTF Post]
Italian libretto by Giovacchino Forzano

Synopsis and Libretto – http://www.opera-arias.com/puccini/gianni-schicchi/


(These performances were edited from Capital Public Radio podcasts, available on the Internet Archive. All performances include a spoken introduction from commentator Sean Bianco.)