Ana Maria Martinez, Andrea Bocelli, Placido Domingo - Giacomo Puccini: Manon Lescaut (2014) [HDTracks]

Puccini’s Manon Lescaut with Ana María Martínez, Orquestra de la Comunitat Valenciana, Coro de la Generalitat Valenciana and conductor Plácido Domingo is the dark story of love, betrayal, jealousy and death. Manon calls for dramatic, forceful performances and gets the full treatment here in this new studio recording.
The story of the doomed heroine Manon Lescaut has inspired more than one composer, but is perhaps most passionately portrayed in Puccini’s opera, written just ten years after Massenet’s Manon. A grim story of love, betrayal, jealousy and death, it calls for dramatic, forceful performance, and gets the full treatment here in this new studio recording starring Andrea Bocelli.
Now Bocelli brings the full weight of his emotionally charged personality to the tragic role of Puccini’s Des Grieux.
Manon Lescaut was Puccini’s third opera but was the first to bring him European fame. It was based on the eighteenth-century novel by the Abbé Prévost which had already been used as a source for operas by Auber in 1856 and, more famously, by Massenet (with Manon) in 1884. As far as possible Puccini’s libretto avoided scenes already used by Massenet and was the work of a number of hands, including Ruggero Leoncavallo, Giulio Ricordi (Puccini’s publisher) and Puccini himself. But the chief credit must undoubtedly go to Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa, the future librettists of La Bohème, Tosca and Madama Butterfly. The opera was first produced at the Teatro Regio, Turin, in February 1893 and achieved an immediate success. After the London premiere in 1894 George Bernard Shaw, then a music critic, wrote the prophetic words: “Puccini looks to me more like the heir to Verdi than any of his rivals”.