Puccini is much more than the man who gave the world Boheme, Butterfly and Tosca - and conductor Giordano Bellincampi is out to prove that with the composer's Manon Lescaut.
It's the Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra's annual Opera in Concert, presented with New Zealand Opera, and the work that made Puccini's name back in 1893. Audiences were won over and one critic, emerging from Milan's La Scala after its premiere, hailed Manon as "the work of the genius conscious of his own power".
Italians have always taken their opera very seriously and this particular scribe soon resorted to hyperbole, describing it as "the song of our paganism, of our artistic sensualism" and a work that "caresses us and becomes part of us".
Bellincampi, while not quite so effusive, admits that as a seasoned Puccini conductor, Manon is a favourite and the most personal of all the composer's operas. He does say it's not "calculated to perfection" like La Boheme but perhaps it is the unevenness of Manon that makes it even more beautiful.
"The great tragic duet in the last act has a quality of writing and ambition that you don't see very often in Italian opera," Bellincampi says.
