Puccini: Manon Lescaut (DG)
Puccini's first runaway theatrical success, Manon Lescaut is an intriguing opera, hovering between the rococo world of 18th-century high society and the formless despair of emotional co-dependency, gliding from the student silliness of Act One to the weird stillness of that desolate death scene in the Louisiana desert. Riccardo Muti and the La Scala orchestra rise to the symphonic challenges on this new recording - "live" if you count a few ripples of applause and the odd unexplained thump - and Jose Cura is irresistibly introspective as the blameless Des Grieux, while the Russian soprano Maria Guleghina portrays Manon as a somewhat querulous siren. Absorbing, that's the word: absorbing.
Arminta Wallace