Giacomo Puccini wrote the opera in 1924 amidst a turbulent time. The composer’s full name was Giacomo Antonio Domenico Michele Secondo Maria Puccini. His music is revered and performed 100 years on. The production at Sydney Opera House is as grand as Puccini’s opera with monumental sets, immersive projections, mesmerising dance and of-course, Nessun Dorma ( None shall sleep).
International director and choreographer Ann Yee created a spectacular new TURANDOT which made for unmissable theatre. Yee draws the threads of the story into a powerful tale of strength and resilience. Puccini’s atmospheric music takes one to another world, traversing the emotional extremes of his largest choral piece.
The very exciting soprano Rebecca Nash takes on the role of Turandot with acclaimed tenor Young Woo Kim playing the role of Calef.
The role of Liu is graced by the phenomena Maria Teresa Leva who delivered a masterful rendition.
The scale of the opera is epic with visuals that dazzle, huge sets, bold choreography, dripping in theatrical magic and stagecraft that is jaw-dropping. The wow factor is on another level. Every scene pulsed with excitement, complementing the visual drama and high energy movement.
This is opera at its peak. The staging, although sombre reflecting the story line, uses contemporary influences and allowed the mesmerising dance to bring a new perspective to the tale.
Opera fans know the story by heart but its the renewed fulfilment of the current production that makes it regenerative. Its a compelling feast for the senses. Tonight was grand opera with unparalleled scale and spectacle.
It’s interesting why the role of Turandot demands insane amounts of stamina and power, making it one of the hardest to cast in the whole soprano repertoire. That’s why opera houses don’t put it on as frequently as Tosca or La Boheme. It is Puccini’s favourite opera and his swansong, left unfinished at his death and completed by Franco Alfano.
There is something profoundly different about Turandot– a kind of power that’s absent from Puccini’s other works– something absolute and overwhelming. Tosca grabs you by the gut, La Boheme captures your heart, but TURNADOT, at least for me, is bewitching and then capsizing.
I always felt the ending to be contrived. For one thing, Calaf is hard to be liked. Turandot is an icy maiden, the embodiment of cruelty, who takes pleasure in shedding blood. Calaf is selfish, caring little for the well-being of his blind father and fails to see the true, selfless love in Liu. Yes, Turandot is cruel, but she has a backstory, which she tells us in her aria In questa reggia.
As a romantic love story, TURANDOT is as flawed as it is unsatisfying. It does not always add up when you look at it as a story of destiny, redemption, accounts settled, and order restored, it suddenly makes perfect sense. its all in the libretto. Once you know that, Puccini’s music has been telling you that all along.
Puccini based this opera on a Persian short story and a commedia dell’arte play of the same name. Turandot is a fantasy fable, a fictitious legend that serves as a cautionary tale about love and leadership. Although the opera concludes with marriage and love triumphant, it comes with a heavy cost. To conquer Turandot, Calaf loses his father’s love and sees Liu make the ultimate sacrifice.
Nessun Dorma, one of the greatest tenor arias ever written is handled majestically by Young Woo Kim whose powerful rendition tingled even the most opera- resistant spines. How did Puccini fill the aria with so much love and hope when the rest of the opera is so cruel? Our optimistic hero has a climatic top note at the end (a top B) which appears on the word Vincero which literally means “I shall win”. His name is Calaf but Turandot uses poetic licence to use the name ‘Love’. She melts in his arms and they live happily after– despite all the corpses.
The world of TURANDOT is a place of cruelty and horror and this is what gives Nessum Dorma it’s power. We know life can suck but we want to believe in love and the beauty of self- sacrifice, too. It’s a paradox, the master expressed deeply in all his operas.
The BBC used Luciano Pavarotti’s immortal 1972 recording of Nessum Dorma to promote their coverage of the 1999 World Cup in Italy. Somehow the fans turned the immortal words “I Will Win Turandot’s Hand in Marriage ” into “I Will Win Three-Nil”!
Story-wise, the basic premise is pain healed by love, and the journey from one to the other is laden with high stakes, intrigue, life and death all in a huge spectacle. Its a bold story, interestingly created by Ann Yee, and not placed in China. The eponymous soprano, Turandot, doesn’t sing till the middle of Act 2, but when she sings, she is fearless, clear in her pain, and committed to protecting that pain.
She projects strength, never wavering in her love of her ancestor and willing to go to violent depth to protect that memory. She is holding so much intergenerational trauma and isolation. Its sheer brilliance by the director to cast Lou-Ling as Hoyori Maruo, the featured dancer who, traditionally, is not on stage, to allow the audience to feel and see the wound that lives in Turandot.
The orchestra, chorus and dancers spun magic into this creative production winning thunderous applause at the conclusion of the opera.
