Anna Picard

What’s love got to do with it?

Yet sometimes the singers struggle to be heard over the brazen glow of Puccini's orchestrations

issue 05 March 2016

The setting for Il tabarro, the first drama in Puccini’s 1918 triptych of one-act operas, is not the Paris of tourists and honeymooners, nor even the Paris of impoverished poets and painters. On a bend in the Seine a Dutch barge is moored at a soot-blackened wharf. A tableau of stevedores and seamstresses unfreezes.

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