Puccini brought madly and viscerally to life
Turandot
Opera North, Leeds Town Hall
High drama offstage at Opera North as its Serbian music director Aleksandar Markovic, in post for only a matter of months, quit last week out of the blue, without a word on either side of regret or thanks. Whatever the explanation, everyone is keeping mum, the only clue being the announcement that Markovic will be returning to Vienna “in due course”. Hmmmm.
Stepping into the breach for this magnificent performance of Puccini’s last opera is Sir Richard Armstrong, a seasoned pro who served for many years as music director of Welsh National Opera and Scottish Opera.
But this assignment must be quite a challenge even for someone of his experience, not least because the venue isn’t Opera North’s home at Leeds’s Grand Theatre, but the grandiose Victorian interior of the city’s Town Hall, recently used for the company’s excellent Ring cycle and as resonant in acoustic as it is majestic of decoration.
In such an environment, it’s unwise to aim for subtlety, and Armstrong shrewdly paints the score’s orientalism in overtly brilliant colours, driving the tension hard and piling up the climaxes. It’s a reading that falls just the right side of crudity, bristling with the music’s savage energy and decadent splendour but also capturing much of its sheer modernist weirdness. The orchestra plays for him with gusto.
Annabel Arden has directed what might on paper be labelled “a semistaging”. What emerges, however, has all the impact of a full-scale production: despite the absence of much in the way of scenery, the principals are costumed and act their emotions out vividly, the chorus is imaginatively choreographed, the lighting highly atmospheric. The drama is viscerally alive and nobody could complain of being short-changed of spectacle.
And what a first-rate cast Opera North has curated. Orla Boylan is a soprano whose promise hasn’t been fulfilled in recent years, but here as the ice princess she is operating at full throttle, sailing above the stave and
‘Armstrong’s reading falls just the right side of crudity, bristling with the music’s savage energy’
glorying in her power through “In questa reggia” before love casts its spell. Her nemesis Liu is the Korean Sunyoung Seo, projecting clean bright tone and self-sacrificing humanity.
That most reliable and resourceful of tenors Rafael Rojas makes a heroic Calaf whose “Nessun dorma” transcends the Pavarotti cliché. Gavan Ring leads a finely balanced trio of ministers elegantly, and the inexhaustible chorus kicks up a storm in those terrifyingly fascistic hymns of the first two acts.
Opera North often delivers best when being most madly gung-ho: this is a case in point, and the result of its bold ambition is a complete triumph. Further performances tonight, May 12 and 14 (0844 949 2720), and touring to Nottingham and Hull