A Memorable Experience 'Fedora' - reviewed by ROBERT ANDERSON 'Giordano's wishes were admirably followed ...'

'Russia with Love' can mean almost anything. So far in my case it has involved only an honorary doctorate and professorship. Others have experienced the fatality of knives, bullets and mysterious poisons. The second of Giordano's mainstay operas involves the assassination, masterminded by a young woman, of Tsar Alexander II. He had liberated the serfs in 1861, two years before Lincoln did the same for American slaves. Not that their apparent generosity saved either of them from a murderous end. The opera wanders from a violent St Petersburg, via a Paris absorbed in standard operatic gaiety, to a Bernese Oberland where passions should be as pure as the mountain air.

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