Puccini: Turandot at the Forbidden City of Beijing (1999), 8

Add a Plot »
Directors: Hugo Käch, Ruth Käch (co-director)
Yimou Zhang ... stage director
Zubin Mehta ... conductor
Stars: Giovanna Casolla, Sergej Larin, Barbara Frittoli.
Chen Weiya ... choreographer

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0205483/

First performed in 1926. Apparently Puccini died with the last half of the 3rd act to be created, and that was completed by a friend, Franco Alfano using Puccini's notes (per Simon's 100 Greatest Operas).

Although I intended just to let it run to test the disc, the images captured my attention. It _is_ interesting to have the story performed in the historical location where the fiction was set, especially in 1999. And the camera doesn't always stay on the performers; architecture, sunset/sunrise, ancient artwork, landscapes also are cut in to remind us this is not just a stage made to look like the Palace, but the Palace itself.

They were able to build seating for an audience; I think they said 4000. They're pretty quiet until the end. Don't know if they had any titles to help them understand the Italian.

Spoiler: The moment when Liu grabs Turandot's hair ornament and kills herself goes very fast. I had to rewind a few times to catch it.

The tenor didn't hold the final note on Nessun dorma as long as they do in concert.

A featurette from '99 said the director (Zhang) had 3 Oscar noms; he has over 100 (60/40 win/nom) by now, but none are actually from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

I'd love to see a "traditional" version now, and learn the story properly. I have no idea why the prince didn't want to reveal his name to Turandot, and Liu died for it (and other reasons), but then he does give it to her.

It's been 24 hours since I watched it, and the closing chorus is still in my ears, which is a good thing. And it's doesn't linger because Looney Tunes used it for a wascally wabbit.

live opera, various+ KQED, cond. Mehta; 8

Puccini: Turandot (2002), 7

2h 8min | Music, Musical | TV Movie August 2002

Add a Plot »

Director: Brian Large

Conductor: Valery Gergiev

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0376276/

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

Puccini: Turandot (2012), 7

2h 4min | Musical | 24 November 2012
A princess avoiding marriage creates an obstructive 3-question riddle with a fatal penalty for failure. When a prince succeeds, her reaction, and the prince's response, cause senseless tragedy.
Director: Cameron Kirkpatrick

Conductor: Andrea Licata

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3791850/

Other performances in my notes (rated 7 or 8).

First performance at Milan, April 25, 1926

Time: legendary 

Place: Peking 

I like the visuals: lots of interesting movement; don't miss the dancing Temptress in Act III. Of course, the music is terrific. The performances are not stellar. And I watched it late at night when I feel the need to keep the volume down, so I'm not sure if the audio is all that good. It seems as though the mics were either too close or too far from the singers, and perhaps the audience wasn't well recorded; they didn't seem to give much appreciation except to Liu.

Cast:

PRINCESS TURANDOT Soprano : Susan Foster

THE EMPEROR OF CHINA (Altoum) Tenor : Benjamin Rasheed

TIMUR, exiled King of Tartary Bass : Jud Arthur

CALAF, his son (the “Unknown Prince”) Tenor : Rosario La Spina

LIÙ, a slave girl Soprano : Hyeseoung Kwon

PING, Grand Chancellor China Baritone : Andrew Moran

PANG, Supreme Lord of Provisions Tenor : Graeme Macfarlane

PONG, Supreme Lord of the Imperial Kitchen Tenor : David Corcoran

A HERALD (A Mandarin) Baritone : Shane Lowrencev

Rated (none)

Opera Australia, cond. Licata; 7

Yes, Giorgio (1982), 6+

PG | 1h 50min | Comedy , Musical | 24 September 1982
A famous opera singer, Giorgio Fini, loses his voice during an American tour. He goes to a female throat specialist, Pamela Taylor, whom he falls in love with.
Director: Franklin J. Schaffner
Stars: Luciano Pavarotti, Kathryn Harrold, Eddie Albert.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0084931/
Watched online, fuzzy print.

17 songs in the Soundtracks.

The doctor comes to him, he doesn't go to her.

3.9 average rating with 560+ IMDb votes. I cannot imagine why the rating is so low. It's not a great film, but not a turkey.

What I don't like: the plot and the female lead. What I like: the singing, except I Left My Heart In San Francisco, which is not adjusted for tenor.

The plot is LP, with wife & 2 kids back in Italy, has the "right" to his own "personal life", so he pursues the doctor, perhaps just because she resists him and dislikes opera.

He conquers her, and then makes her promise not to fall in love with him. <eyeroll> She promises, but later does, and gets him to claim to love her too. <eyeroll 2>

Subplot: he refuses to sing at the Met because of a big fiasco during his performance 7 years earlier; the description is bad, not trivial. But his new "love" talks him into appearing when they need him in a week to sing in Turandot, but it's in a kitchen where he's preparing a meal for a large group, and they get into a food fight. (The excess of whipped cream topped pies was a big tip off.) When he gets to the Met, they have a ridiculous giant mechanical dragon onstage, which malfunctions during rehearsal.

He does show for the performance, the audience gives him a standing ovation when he first walks onstage. He sings Nessun dorma, twice, the second is an encore. The doctor is in the audience, but leaves during the encore, blowing him a kiss goodbye, and The End.

KH has no appeal, either before or after he lands her. She makes a good doctor, but not a romantic interest for LP. I don't know whom I would have cast instead, but it's just flat. Maybe Ann-Margaret? It's been almost 20 years since Bye Bye Birdie ('63).

Frankly, watching LP in a real opera is much better. But as he says on Letterman in Oct'82, this film hopes (in theatres then) to attract more people to opera. Maybe if it had better chemistry between the leads.

EA plays LP's long-time manager.

MGM, dir. Schaffner; 6+

Update 6Nov2020: Upgrading to 6+. Still don't like the leading lady, but like the film. I'm binging on LP nowadays, and he sings plenty here. Having consumed a lot of Met performances since my first comments, the scenes at the "Met" don't look very realistic. The house & stage are too small, L.Mitchell sang Liu, not Turandot, and the attitude of the stagehands botching the dragon is much too relaxed.

Alfano: Cyrano de Bergerac (2008), 8-

2h 20min | Drama, Musical, Romance | 2 March 2008
While best known today for having composed the ending to Puccini's unfinished Turandot, Franco Alfano wrote some dozen operas, including Cyrano de Bergerac (1936) with a libretto by Henri Cain based on Edmond Rostand's drama of the same name. It is a moving tale of romantic misunderstanding, swashbuckling bravado and heartbreaking loyalty, in which the eloquent Cyrano feels unable to express his love for Roxane because of his famously protuberant nose--except on behalf of his handsome but inarticulate friend, Christian. 
Director: Tiziano Mancini
Conductor: Patrick Fournillier
Stars: Plácido Domingo, Sondra Radvanovsky, Arturo Chacón-Cruz.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1329126/

Premiere 1936 (in Italian), Rome
Alfano originally set the text in French, which is how it's performed in this video.

The Rostrand play opens in Paris, 1640. (I have not found this information for the Alfano opera.)

This is my second Alfano: Cyrano, the first being Alfano: Cyrano de Bergerac (2005), 9 with R.Alagno as C, and his brothers doing the production design/direction. They managed to mine more comedy from the script, and RA had more swash in his buckle. PD is dignified and hurt, singing and acting splendidly as always. But with RA you get the extra pleasure of a native speaker singing in French. RA's nose was less extreme, but neither was rendered ugly by the prosthetic, as Cyrano describes himself.

Audio is less than ideal, with the singers sounding far from the mics, but perhaps normal for recorded onstage in 2008.

I like the story a lot, and wish other composers had done this, or done it well enough that we have performances available. I don't find any other Cyrano opera on Amazon,

This opera house is in Valencia, Spain.

ValencianaOpera, cond. Fournillier; 8-

Puccini: Gianni Schicchi (2005), 8

1h 14min | Music | TV Movie 30 May 2005
Greedy relatives scheme with a clever fellow to rewrite a newly-deceased miser's will.
Director: Annabel Arden
Conductor: Vladimir Jurowski

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8815616/

Although Amazon lists the dvd as 74min, the opera is only 57:24.

I should have shopped better and held out for the Triptych with operas Il tabarro and Suor Angelica, since all 3 are 1-acts. This is Puccini's only comic opera, and his penultimate opera, the last being Turandot which had to be finished by a colleague.

Time: 1299
Place: Florence

First performance at New York, December 14, 1918

Costumes here invoke the time of the premiere, not 6+centuries prior, despite the year being mentioned in the lyrics, and the penalty for fraud being medieval.

Played for comedy. Title character comes from Dante's Inferno.

The soprano trio is lovely.

I can't find any reference to this, but I'd swear that the music of Lauretta's aria is from Madama Butterfly or some other Puccini work. Maybe it's just a popular concert piece; I can find most lyric sopranos singing O mio babbino caro on YouTube.

Well-paired with Rachmaninov: The Miserly Knight. 

Cast: 

GIANNI SCHICCHI Baritone : Alessandro Corbelli
LAURETTA, his daughter Soprano : Sally Matthews
Relations of Buoso Donati:
    ZITA, his cousin Contralto : Felicity Palmer
    RINUCCIO, her nephew Tenor : Massimo Giordano
    GHERARDO, nephew of Buoso Tenor : Adrian Thompson
    NELLA, his Wife Soprano : Olga Schalaewa
    GHERARDINO, their son Contralto : Christopher Waite
    BETTO DI SIGNA, brother-in-law of Buoso Baritone or Bass : Maxim Mikhailov
    SIMONE, BUOSO’S cousin Bass : Luigi Roni
    MARCO, his son Baritone : Riccardo Novaro
    LA CIESCA, his wife Mezzo-soprano  : Marie McLaughlin
SPINELLOCCIO, a doctor Bass  : Viacheslav Voynarovskiy
AMANTIO DI NICOLAO, a lawyer Baritone or Bass  : Richard Mosley-Evans

Rated (none)

Glyndebourne Opera, cond. Jurowski; 8