Director, Andrei Șerban; Designer, Sally Jacobs; Lighting designer, F. Mitchell Dana; Conductor, Daniel Oren. Cast: Princess Turandot, Anna Netrebko; Calaf, Yusif Eyvazov; Liù, Masabane Cecilia Rangwanasha; Timur, Rafał Siwek; Ping, Simone Del Savio; Pang, Emmanuel Fonoti-Fuimaono; Pong, James Kryshak; Emperor Altoum, Raúl Giménez; Mandarin, Ossian Huskinson
I spent my day in London partly at my laptop, partly doing some shopping, before going to Choral Evensong (some very fine Palestrina) at St Paul’s Cathedral and then on to Covent Garden for Turandot. I’ve seen this production once before, in 2017. It is one of Covent Garden’s most venerable ones – at least 40 years ago – but it still looks very good., and much less silly than the equally venerable Met Zeffirelli offering I saw on screen a few years ago. I thought at that time that I had probably had enough of live Turandot performances for the foreseeable future, but I reckoned without the return of Anna Netrebko to the Covent Garden stage. I have heard her only once live before – as Tatiana in Eugene Onegin in Vienna in 2015 – and I was fascinated to see how she would perform Turandot and whether her voice was right for the role.
I realised that apart from possibly in the 70s (did I see Nilsson in this role? – I seem to remember the Cecil Beaton sets but think it was probably Amy Shuard in 1973), I have only seen Turandot live that once, in 2017. And I also realised that, while I know the famous parts of the music from recordings, I don’t know the details of the plot and what the characters are doing in any detail. I found this performance gripping throughout until after the death of Liu. It may be 40 years old but it is a tremendous show, with its dancers, masks, carts and chariots, red ribbons flying down, huge cut-off heads, the emperor coming down from Heaven, the floating moon and the towering sets. It is never over the top in the Met manner and the masks, the emphasis on the blood and cruelty, made the setting sinister, not just a tawdry bit of early 20th century Orientalism. The agony of the Chinese people under the terrible regime of Turandot is emphasised – I had never really picked up on the desperate choruses before. Although I suppose cultural appropriation is involved, the production seemed less disrespectful than the Met one. In fact, at the end of the 2nd act, I was in a state of high excitement – this must really be, I thought, one of the best things I’ve been to this year. However, as I guess in every production of Turandot, you cannot hide the fact that what happens after .the death of Liu in Act 3 – which was where in completed full score Puccini left the work when he died – is a bit of a mess, musically and dramatically. The Wikipedia article on Turandot suggests there is still Mahler 10/Elgar 3 type work to be done on Puccini’s sketches, beyond what Alfano reconstructed; there are also bits Alfano did complete which Toscanini (?) cut and aren’t always heard in modern performances. Whatever further work might be done, the ending is dramatically unconvincing and musically seems to tread water. Perhaps the fault lies with the librettists – I think Puccini was on the 4th version of the text when he died, but he had spent months trying to wrestle with the issue of how Turandot changes from ice-princess to a more normal human being. Perhaps it should have been Turandot who dies and not Liu……? Until the death of Liu, I was constantly amazed by the colour of the score and how attuned it was to the work of Puccini’s contemporaries – there’s flecks of Debussy, Stravinsky and Mahler to be heard, but all recast into something immediately recognisable as Puccini. After the death of Liu I found my enthusiasm flagging and felt increasingly disengaged.
Anna Netrebko was simply tremendous as Turandot. She has the classic operatic superstar ability to make you focus on her every move and she commands the stage whenever she is on it. Martin Kettle in his Guardian review puts her in the Callas/Sutherland league. I never saw either of them, so can’t comment, but certainly she has that same magic that some singers I have seen – Janet Baker, Boris Christoff, Birgit Nilsson – possessed. Her voice was much more powerful than I was expecting, pinging out the top notes, and with an impressive lower register. I heard little of the Slavonic vibrato I was also anticipating. What I did hear was acute attention to words, to phrasing, to line, so that everything she sings sounds freshly minted. Her rendition of the riddles was astonishingly detailed and imaginatively sung, and In questia reggia was overwhelming. This was, simply, a great performance.
Masabane Cecilia Rangwanasha is no great actor, but her Liu was beautifully and thoughtfully sung, she was sensibly costumed and was a worthy counterpart to Netrebko on stage. About Yusif Eyvazov (Netrebko’s ex….) as Calaf, I had mixed feelings. He’s a thorough professional and Nessun Dorma was sung with all the heft it needs; he’s also quite a competent actor, and can use face and stance intelligently to emphasise what he’s singing. His voice is un-Italianate (fair enough, he’s Russian) and decidedly gravelly – there wasn’t much lyricism in his singing, but, I guess, if you have to balance heft against lyricism for this role, heft probably wins out. Ping, Pang and Pong made more sense than they did to me 8 and a half years ago, and I thought the way the trio worked together and got their lines across was very effective – it helped that one of them could do somersaults……Timur and the Emperor were well sung, and I should mention also the dancers, who have a lot to do in this production and have a major role in making it imposing, were tremendous.
Reviews of Daniel Oren’s conducting on the first night were universally negative – it was said he made the orchestra play too loudly and too insensitively. For me, it was good enough – the Lower Slips inevitably highlights the orchestra’s role (you’re almost sitting on top of them, though from a distance) and the voices didn’t seem overpowered by how the orchestra played this wonderful score.
Here’s a short trailer which gives a further sense of what the production looks like – Turandot
John's musical journey 