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Director: Brian Large
Conductor: Valery Gergiev
First performance at Milan, April 25, 1926
Time: legendary
Place: Peking
I read the Simon (100 Great Operas) synopsis beforehand, and paid better attention to the dialog (although not to Ping, Pang and Pong; Simon trivializes their roles.) I'm ready to quibble with the plot.
Princess Turandot (T.) wants to avoid marriage, so she tests her suitors with a trio of riddles. To cut down on attempts, the penalty for failing to answer the riddles correctly is death.
Along comes an Unknown Prince (U.P., and how do we know he's a prince if his identity is unknown?) and who falls for this beauty (neither principal here is actually worth looking at), and insists he can answer the riddles. After various people attempt to dissuade him, he persists, and faces T, answering each correctly. She's devastated, and he loves her so much he gives her an out: she must guess his name before dawn. (No, it's not Rumpelstiltskin.) Just to sweeten the pot, if she gets his name right, he'll also submit to the execution he would have faced if he'd failed the riddles.
Here's my big objection: He knows there are 2 people in town who actually know his name, and he knows townspeople have seen them with him. So when T's henchmen go out raiding homes to find someone who knows this name, U.P. is putting those people in jeopardy along with himself. They happen to be his father and dad's servant girl (Liu). Liu loves U.P., and is loyal to his father, so she claims to be the only one who knows the name, and accepts a bunch of torture, then manages to stab herself to death without revealing the name (yet protecting U.P's ailing dad).
Does the story really need the father & Liu to be introduced before U.P. gets riddled? Do we need them to try to talk him out of riddling? We have local officials (Ping, Pang, Pong) who do that, describing the 13 guys who've already perished and how gruesome the deaths were.
I think it would make for better drama, and a less idiotic U.P, if they just happened to be in town, unbeknownst to U.P. before he offers T this name-game riddle.
Puccini died before completing Act III (according to Simon, he got through the point where Liu kills herself), and he didn't write the libretto. But I can't help wondering if he had survived to see this produced, whether he might have rewritten that.
Also weird: Liu's death should make this a tragedy, but we get the happy ending of T & U.P's marriage.
The visuals of the production are quite imaginative and interesting. The people in T's domain are cyborgs. (Notes: Edward Scissorhands ('90); 1st Borg episode of ST:TNG was '89: s2e16.) When T falls for U.P at the end, her constituents lose most of their hardware. But as cyborgs they had colorful costumes; as organic beings they wear shades of gray. In addition to the film/tv already mentioned, the sets reminded me of Metropolis ('27), Modern Times ('36) and any number of prison films including Jailhouse Rock ('57). We also had a couple of giant puppets onstage, which reminded me of Stravinsky's Oedipus Rex ('93), except that these had puppeteers in addition to a singer in the center of the enormous puppet.
The staging of T as aloof inquisitor was very good: see the poster's open head with a giant gold thing in the center. That's T on a 9 meter platform covered by a 10+ meter gown. When U.P cracks the riddles, her platform immediately compresses, she sheds the gown, and she's onstage in tatters. Nice.
The cast is not great. The audience threw their appreciation to Liu, and I agree. The music is gorgeous, and this is home to an enormously famous aria: Nessun dorma. Unfortunately its staging was in a bad place acoustically, and/or the tenor didn't have the chops, or maybe the direction was to NOT please the crowd by belting it out. I was not pleased, and U.P. got the least applause of the principals. T (b. '51) likely has a lot of Wagnerian roles in her rep; she looked and sounded like an aging Brunhilde, much older than U.P (b. '65).
Cast:
PRINCESS TURANDOT Soprano : Gabriele Schnaut
THE EMPEROR OF CHINA Tenor : Robert Tear (Altoum)
TIMUR, exiled King of Tartary Bass : Paata Burchuladze
CALAF, his son (the “Unknown Prince”) Tenor : Johan Botha
LIÙ, a slave girl Soprano : Cristina Gallardo Domas
PING, Grand Chancellor China Baritone : Boaz Daniel
PANG, Supreme Lord of Provisions Tenor : Vicente Ombuena
PONG, Supreme Lord of the Imperial Kitchen Tenor : Steve Davislim
A HERALD Baritone : (Ein Mandarin? Robert Bork)
Rated 8.0 (27)
distr. TDK, cond. Gergiev; 7
