Opera Rara

[upbeat music] Welcome to Lives in Song, a series from Opera Rara with me, Flora Wilson, looking at the lives of composers and other musicians through their music.

In this season, we're focusing on Giacomo Puccini, the man responsible for some of the most popular music in all opera.

He rose to fame just as Giuseppe Verdi's career was drawing to a close, and he lived to own motorcars, use the telephone, and give the recording industry some of its earliest hits.

If you haven't already done so, do remember to hit follow or subscribe to make sure you don't miss any future episodes.

And in today, the final episode of this season, I'm delighted to be joined once again in the Creative Kin studio in London by Dr. Ditlef Brindse, opera scholar, Puccini specialist, and the editor of a new critical edition of Puccini's La rondine.

Today, he'll be taking us behind the scenes of the painstaking process of reconstructing a version of the opera long assumed to be lost, and we'll also be giving you some sneak previews of a brand-new recording of the 1921 version of the opera ahead of its release on the Opera Rara label in the autumn.

So, great to have you with us.

Let's get going.