Richard Hickox, Spoleto Festival Orchestra - Gian Carlo Menotti: The Saint of Bleecker Street (2002)
EAC | FLAC | Image (Cue & Log) ~ 526 Mb | Total time: 51:20+73:32 | Scans included
Classical | Label: Chandos | # CHAN 9971 | Recorded: 2001
EAC | FLAC | Image (Cue & Log) ~ 526 Mb | Total time: 51:20+73:32 | Scans included
Classical | Label: Chandos | # CHAN 9971 | Recorded: 2001
The profane and the profound, the lurid and the saintly, rub elbows in Menotti's operas. In The Saint of Bleecker Street, religious faith and disbelief are interwoven with drunken outbursts, taunts, and a stabbing. It's as if Puccini's Suor Angelica and Il Tabarro had been crossed with Gershwin's Porgy and Bess. The plot concerns the fragile Annina, a girl revered in New York's Little Italy because of her supposed ability to heal the sick. She hears voices, sees visions, and receives the stigmata as she vicariously relives the Passion of Jesus Christ. Her obsessively devoted brother Michele rejects these phenomena, believing them simply to be mumbo-jumbo imagined or thrust upon her by others.