The profane and the profound, the lurid and the saintly, rub elbows in Menotti's operas. In The Saint of Bleecker Street, religious faith and disbelief are interwoven with drunken outbursts, taunts, and a stabbing. It's as if Puccini's Suor Angelica and Il Tabarro had been crossed with Gershwin's Porgy and Bess. The plot concerns the fragile Annina, a girl revered in New York's Little Italy because of her supposed ability to heal the sick. She hears voices, sees visions, and receives the stigmata as she vicariously relives the Passion of Jesus Christ. Her obsessively devoted brother Michele rejects these phenomena, believing them simply to be mumbo-jumbo imagined or thrust upon her by others.
''Attention, attention! Unknown flying objects from another planet and creatures identified so far only as Globolinks have landed on Planet Earth. All citizens are asked to remain calm. Be on your guard. Stay tuned for further broadcasts. THE GLOBOLINKS ARE HERE!'' A scene from a science fiction movie? It certainly could have been; the admonition is so familiar but, no, this is the opening spoken narrative that follows some evocative night skies, space-sweeping and reminiscent-of- schooldays orchestral music in Menotti's space-age opera for children of all ages, “Help, Help, The Globolinks”. Composed in 1968 and first performed in Hamburg, Menotti's music for “Globolinks” is appealing and accessible and often very amusing.
A major new, native recording of a sparkling operatic double-bill. After Amelia goes to the ball was staged in 1937 at the Metropolitan Opera with acclaim, Gian Carlo Menotti became hot property. Two further radio operas were comparative failures but it was with The Medium that Menotti really hit his stride. A tragedy in two acts for five singers, a dance-mime role and a chamber orchestra of 14 players, Menotti’s opera is both dramatically astute in the Puccini tradition and composed with an acute ear for mood and mystery: the score, often quite dissonant, conveys an eerie, morbid atmosphere. According to the composer, ‘The Medium is actually a play of ideas. It describes the tragedy of a woman caught between two worlds, a world of reality which she cannot wholly comprehend, and a supernatural world in which she cannot believe.’