MANON LESCAUT Puccini – Poznań Opera

Name: MANON LESCAUT Puccini – Poznań Opera
Director: Gerard Jones
Duration: 182 min
Cast: Iwona Sobotka, Dominik Sutowicz, Jaromir Trafankowski, Rafał Korpik, Piotr Kalina

Iwona Sobotka Dominik Sutowicz Jaromir Trafankowski Rafał Korpik Piotr Kalina

Destined for the convent, the young Manon falls head over heels in love with a handsome stranger and decides to flee with him. Yet aspiring to a life of wealth and luxury, she ends up throwing herself into the arms of a rich nobleman. Can she forget her true love? Puccini’s adaptation of the novel by Abbé Prévost had a complicated gestation. An alarmingly long list of librettists succeed each other in trying to satisfy the composer’s demands in terms of dramatic structure and fine verbal detail. Was Puccini struggling perhaps to make his opera sufficiently different from Massenet’s on the same subject? Puccini probably never reached a ‘definitive’ form of this opera but it was his first international success and arguably the first in which the composer found his voice as a musical dramatist. Opera Poznań has entrusted their new production - streamed live on the opening night - to a former winner of the European Opera Directing Prize, Gerard Jones, and conductor Marco Guidarini.