(From, Birmingham)
' La Gioconda'
(Ponchielli)
Act III
THE HOUSE OF GOLD
THE BIRMINGHAM GRAND OPERA'S SOCIETY
CHORUS
THE BIRMINGHAM STUDIO AUGMENTED
ORCHESTRA
Conducted by JOSEPH LEWIS
THE story of La Gioconda is as grim a tragedy as can be found in the whole literature of opera. La Gioconda (The Joyous One) is a popular singer in olden Venice. The third act takes place in the Palaco of Alvise. He imagines he has found his lady betraying him, and hands her a phial of poison which slip must drink before the last sounds of a serenade which is being played in the street outside, die away. Ho leaves her, ,and La Gioconda comes out from behind a curtain where she was hidden. She is in Laura's debt for a kindness shown to her old blind mother, and she gives the condemned lady a narcotic which will cause her to seem dead, in place of the poison phial. Laura drinks it and Alvise comes back to find her apparently lifeless.
A great entertainment is prepared for his friends, and at the height of the festivities he calls for silence, and draws back the heavy curtain at one end of the hall. His guests see Laura lying apparently dead on a black bier in the robes in which she is to be buried. Enzo, to whom Laura has long ago been betrothed, rushes towards Alvise to kill him.but the others hold him back and he is carried off as a prisoner.
The libretto was made from Victor Hugo 's story pi ' Angelo, the Tyrant of Padua,' by the composer Boito, better remembered for his work in that way than for his own music.