The 27th annual Bard Music Festival - an exploration of "Puccini and His World" - opens this Friday, August 5 with Weekend One: Puccini and Italian Musical Culture.
The first of the weekend's five themed concerts, Program 1: "Opera, Politics, and the Italian," examines the ways Italians perceived their newly unified homeland in the comparatively peaceful half-century between the Risorgimento and the First World War, through operatic and other excerpts by Giacomo Puccini (1858-1924) and his contemporaries.
Source: http://www.broadwayworld.com/
