Evident Delight Puccini's 'La rondine' - heard by ROBERT ANDERSON '... exciting acrobatics ...'

With three undoubted winners already behind him, Puccini lost focus to some extent with La fanciulla del West and more completely in La rondine. Of course Richard Strauss's change of direction from Elektra to Rosenkavalier was a matter of extreme fascination to any operatic composer, but the wily Puccini was not the man to emulate the even more wily German. La rondine pretends to be operetta with a succession of some thirty numbers; but Puccini's essentially doomladen lyricism lifts it into an uneasy no-woman's-land of its own....

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ITALY