Madame Butterfly

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Record Number: 8.000

Record Type: Text/Image

Caption:

Puccini's Madame Butterfly 1946 performance at the Winter Gardens by the Carl Rosa Opera Company.

Summary:

MADAM BUTTERFLY

PUCCINI

Lieutenant Pinkerton (U.S. Navy)…………………………………..ROBERT SYDNEY

Goro (a Marriage Broker)……………………………………………ROBERT SCOTT

Sharpless (the American Consul)…………………………………….OTAKAR KRAUS

The Imperial Commissioner…………………………………………MARTIN QUINN

The Bonze (Uncle of Cho-Cho-San)………………………………APPLETON MOORE

Yamadori…………………………………………………………...MARTIN QUINN

Kate Pinkerton……………………………………………………….BETTY SAGON

Suzuki……………………………………………………………….RUTH ABBOTT

Butterfly (Cho-Cho-San)…………………………………………..JOAN HAMMOND

Conductor - - VILEM TAUSKY

Cast list for a 1946 performance at the Winter Gardens by the Carl Rosa Opera Company.

The company also presented Cavalleria Rusticana and I Pagliacci that same week.

The Carl Rosa Opera Company is the oldest English touring opera company, having first performed at the Princess’ Theatre, London in 1873.

Czech-born conductor Vilem Tausky was with the company for 3 years following the end of World War II. He had escaped the Nazi advance first to France, and then to Wales on board a Yugoslav coal ship. He conducted concerts with the London and Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestras during the war years. Among the singers he conducted was Joan Hammond who also starred as Tosca in Tausky’s first appearance with the Carl Rosa Company at the Wimbledon Theatre. Tausky’s fellow Czech, Otakar Kraus played Scarpia on that same occasion. Tausky later conducted Kraus again in the role at the Royal Opera House. Tausky was also an early musical director of what is now Welsh National Opera and was associated with both Sadlers Wells and the English Opera Group’s Aldeburgh Festival. Vilem Tausky was best known as conductor of the BBC Concert Orchestra and his many appearances on Friday Night is Music Night on the BBC Light Programme (now Radio 2).

Dame Joan Hammond, the Australian soprano, first appeared in London in 1938 in Handel’s Messiah. She joined the Carl Rosa Company in 1942. She became the first singer to sell over a million recordings of an operatic aria and, by the latter part of the 1940s, had become a household name. Later in 1946 she began touring worldwide. Dame Joan retired from the stage in 1965.

Otakar Kraus joined the Carl Rosa Opera Company in 1943. He performed with the Covent Garden Opera Company from 1951 and appeared at the Bayreuth Festival in the early 1960s.

Notes:

Keywords:

The Morecambe Winter Gardens Preservations Trust Charity No:1113010 - Company No:5556536
Friends of The Winter Gardens Charity No:1064127