Italy Puccini, Turandot: Children’s Chorus (director: Stefania Rinaldi), Chorus and Orchestra of Teatro di San Carlo / Dan Ettinger (conductor). Livestreamed on medici.tv from Teatro di San Carlo, Naples. 9.12.2023. (JPr)
Production:
Director – Vasily Barkhatov
Scenery – Zinovy Margolin
Costumes – Galya Solodovnikova
Lighting – Alexander Sivaev
Chorus master – Piero Monti
Cast:
Turandot – Sondra Radvanovsky
Emperor Altoum – Nicola Martinucci
Timur – Alexander Tsymbalyuk
Calaf – Yusif Eyvazov
Liù – Rosa Feola
Ping – Roberto de Candia
Pang – Gregory Bonfatti
Pong – Francesco Pittari
A Mandarin – Sergio Vitale
First Handmaid – Valeria Attianese
Second Handmaid – Linda Airoldi
The Prince of Persia – Vasco Maria Vagnoli
Like London buses operas often come along in twos, so quite soon after a Paris Turandot (review here) Naples’s Teatro di San Carlo opened their 2023-2024 season with Puccini’s unfinished opera dedicated both to the centenary of the composer’s birth in 1924 and that of Maria Callas in 1923. Sought-after Russian director, Vasily Barkhatov, with one of those modern production which he probably had the idea for even before being asked to do any opera in particular. His Konzept could have been used to stage any number of operas with Lohengrin being top of the list.
There are quotations from Dante’s The Divine Comedy and Ovid’s story of Orpheus and Eurydice from his Metamorphoses, respectively, at the start of acts one and two, the significance of which will resonate more for others than me. More intriguingly we see on film Timur’s funeral in the Church of San Lorenzo and then Turandot and Calaf (in modern dress of course) driving back from it. Turandot says how she hates funerals, knew Timur would have wanted Calaf to be with Liù and was blamed for her suicide. Despite Calaf saying he still wants to marry Turandot; she claims he does not love her now and at that point the car crashes. The damaged car is lowered on the stage as the paramedics get to work on Calaf on a stretcher one of whom is the Mandarin as the opera proper (?) now begins.
We enter a strange world – bracketed by reed beds and inside, what appears to be, a ruined abbey – populated by pagan figures à la The Wicker Man or tribal Africa from times past. Figures enter dragging small canoes and initially Timur and Liù have cone-shaped helmets on their heads woven, I guess, from the reeds. Calaf is in black leather and looks like Batman but with a ‘C’ on his chest. A realistic operating theatre is now lowered down with doctors working to save Calaf’s life after the crash and we will see a distraught Turandot looking on. The ministers, Ping, Pang, Pong, have bird-like carnival masks and Liù has red hair and a white dress with small dragonflies as its motif. At significant points in the story there will be an image of Liù cutting herself. The window looking into the operating theatre will have various things projected onto it during the opera and when Calaf finally calls for Turandot he picks up a brick and smashes the glass. The crashed car comes back down as the act ends.
As Act II starts there is some messing about by Ping, Pang, Pong with a wreath, garland, small lanterns and a wooden box before they retreat to the operating theatre and there are some magic tricks involving the body on the table. A bejewelled Emperor Altoum enters on one of the skiffs encased in a glass coffin with two ‘Scots Guards’ with clown-like skull faces. We realise soon that it is now Turandot who is being operated on in a ‘sliding doors’ development. The onstage Turandot dons a studded skirt and golden armour and looks, almost but not quite, a Wonder Woman figure. Calaf appears to have some of his former memories and looks as if he is trying to remind Turandot who he is, and she will look as though she has similar recollections in Act III. As the riddles are successfully answered neon signs Speranza, Sangue and Turandot are lowered and as the second act ends the car descends in front of the ice princess.
The final act begins and at first, we see Calaf at Turandot’s bedside then Turandot’s at his. The white-robed Calaf will be threatened with scythes and there is no executioner and after Liù sacrifices herself – rather than reveal Calaf’s name – Timur sings ‘Liù! Get up!’ while she just walks off the stage with a cone helmet on her head. We will then see her and Timur rise at the back each in a small boat. As we start the Alfano completion Turandot is stripped of her armour, rather like Brünnhilde in Siegfried, and then Calaf launches a full-on assault on her which she resists before melting into his arms. The car goes up and down and the word Amore appears. [Spoiler alert] the final film excerpt shows that after all Turandot and Calaf actually survive the crash and reconcile with a loving kiss while their white-robed counterparts onstage sink down and watch the happy ending on the screen.
Sondra Radvanovsky, who withdrew from Turandot in Paris, is relatively new to the title role, and she sings Turandot with all the steely, steady tone required, much Italianate warmth, fearless top notes, emotional intensity and conviction; allied to an unusual – for this character – womanly demeanour. Yusif Eyvazov’s climactic money note for ‘Nessun Dorma’ rang out and elsewhere he sang cleanly and accurately and with his sturdy voice showing some effortless beauty of tone whilst his acting was confident both on film and stage. Nevertheless, the most nuanced acting and singing came – as it usually does – from the singer portraying Liù, this time Rosa Feola, who sang her arias with exquisite colour and phrasing including the most delicate pianissimos possible. Feola was a splendidly devoted slave girl though the subtlety of this performance was at odds with much that was going on around her. Alexander Tsymbalyuk sang with distinction, gravitas and deep feeling as a beige-suited, all-seeing Timur, Sergio Vitale was an authoritative Mandarin and the characterfully acted Ping, Pang, and Pong of Roberto de Candia, Gregory Bonfatti and Francesco Pittari were sung with precision and panache. Now in his eighties, Nicola Martinucci – a renowned Calaf in his youth – returned to Turandot as a venerable Altoum. The chorus sounded vocally strong and were dramatically impressive.
Dan Ettinger to his credit pressed straight on after ‘Nessun Dorma’ and guided a fine Teatro di San Carlo Orchestra through a Turandot full of intricate detail; conducting with vigour, verve, forward motion and due sensitivity to the opera’s lushness and dramatic power.
Jim Pritchard
Mr Pritchard seems oblivious of the events in Puccini’s life which are mirrored in this production – the early car crash in which he was injured and the suicide of a servant girl accused wrongly of having an affair. Nor does Mr Pritchard recognise the parallels with Orpheus’s love for Eurydice lost in the underworld, nor the voyage of Dante in search of Beatrice. Puccini was also clearly fascinated by the East, including a Tang emperor’s intoxication with a fragrant concubine, celebrated in poetry. The psychological and hallucinatory world induced by anaesthesia under surgery creates a timeless (10,000 year world) in which themes of love and betrayal can be explored. Congrats to San Carlos and Mr Barkhatov for an original and fascinating production.
I’m glad Mr Bottrill enjoyed it but he seems oblivious that it is Dr Pritchard (only joking, but not about Dr which a little research would have discovered).
I have been aware of biographical approaches to Turandot since as early as 1984 when I saw Tony Palmer’s production for Scottish Opera with Calaf/Giacomo, Turandot/Elvira and Liù/Doria and his staging stopped when Puccini’s original music did.
When I was a teacher I asked students to answer the complete exam paper and not just attempt some of the questions. Mr Bottrill gives his thoughts on why we might have seen a few things. However, Puccini was not driving his car when it crashed in 1903 which was several years before Doria Manfredi’s suicide in 1909. With Elvira and their son Puccini was returning from a medical check-up and not a funeral and he was working on Madama Butterfly not Turandot. Neither do I believe the world Barkhatov conjured up was the banks of the Yangtze. What we saw was basically a ‘what if?’ THIS was the outcome or ‘what if?’ THAT was the outcome of the crash. ‘Hallucinatory world’ is a simplistic cop out to explain Calaf as Batman, Turandot as a warrior queen and Emperor Altoum’s Scots Guards amongst much else.
Is this a review or just a summary of the staging? There seems to be absolutely no critical appraisal of what was seen or any kind of engagement with the positive or negative (or neutral) aspects of it. It would have been nice to know what the reviewer thought worked, or what didn’t work and why he thought this was the case.
Jim Pritchard replies: well it probably is a summary of the staging AND a review of the music. That the Konzept was suitable for any number of operas and that there is the ‘sliding doors’ idea (which I explain better, I grant you, in my reply to the other comment above) is sufficient to suggest I had very little ‘engagement’ with what I saw. The well-known director Richard Jones was once asked about his Ring cycle ‘What does it mean?’ and his reply was ‘Well, what does it mean to you?’ That (Mr Bottrill) comment above tries to explain what was seen in San Carlo but the dramaturgy is way off the mark. So if you or others are encouraged by the summary/review to see Vasily Barkhatov’s Turandot please tell me what it means TO YOU.