Undercroft Opera Presents Puccini’s “La Rondine.”

Pittsburgh in the Round: Undercroft Opera is performing a Giacomo Puccini “rarity” this weekend at Carlow University’s Antonian Theatre – La Rondine (“The Swallow”), which hasn’t been heard locally since early 1982, when Pittsburgh Opera presented it here for the first time and the newspaper critics went to work panning it as weak operetta with few moments of importance. The work has never been considered one of the composer’s greatest efforts, in part because it is too often unfavorably compared to his Tosca, Madama Butterfly, La Bohème, and so on.