THE MIDLAND PIANOFORTE SEXTET (Leader,
FRANK CANTELL)
ABOUT fifty years ago Ponchielli promised to rival Verdi as a composer of Italian opera.
After a few years, however, he advanced no farther, and he died when he was little over fifty.
His most successful opera was La Giocondu , whose plot is of the usual somewhat lurid type fashionable at that time.
We are to have the Dance of the Hours, a spectacular Ballet, which occurs in the Third Act. The Ballet represents successively dawn, day, evening and night. It is also intended to symbolizo the eternal struggle between the powers of darkness and light.