MOLDOVAN MAGIC

RODERIC DUNNETT raves about Chisinau National Opera's
'Cavalleria Rusticana' and 'Pagliacci'

Moldova may be one of the smallest countries of the new Europe, a splinter as small as England wedged between Romania and the Ukraine, but it can boast superb wine cellars and plenty of top-notch opera. The Chisinau National Opera, located adjacent to the Presidential palace in the Moldovan capital, is the country's principal opera company; it features some of the finest performers from the south of the former Soviet Union, notably Kiev, Odessa and Chisinau itself (in Russian Kishinev, where Leonid Brezhnev was postwar commissar), many of them trained up by the methods that produced the greatest singers of the Kirov and the Bolshoi.

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