CARBONDALE — The nationally recognized Southern Illinois Music Festival will start its 20th season this week, providing the region an opportunity to enjoy the finest professional singers and instrumentalists from
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Gina Galati’s wonderful Winter Opera company continues its 17th season with Puccini’s Manon Lescaut. This work, which opened in 1893, was Puccini’s first great hit. It was rather daring of Puccini to present this piece, based as it was on a novel that had already been adapted to opera by two other composers first by Daniel Aubert (1856), and then in a hugely successful work by Jules Massenet 1884. But it was an archetypically operatic story an emotional tug-of-war between a rich old man and a poor young one for the affections of a beautiful young woman (viz. La Traviata, La Rondine, Don Pasquale, et alia).
Ed Benyas, who has been instrumental in the promotion of classical and orchestral music in the region for 29 years, has accepted a job in the Seattle area.