Geoff Brown at the Alhambra, Bradford [Times Online, 21 March 2006]

Among the world’s migrating swallows, Puccini’s lyric comedy La Rondine is always a welcome visitor, well able to enchant despite critical carping ever since its debut in 1917. Puccini’s biographer Mosco Carner mentioned “a bird with half-broken wings”; but when a production hits the spot like Francesca Zambello’s 1994 creation for Opera North, this hybrid opera-operetta flies perfectly well.