Sadistic pomp done to perfection
Opera Turandot Royal Opera House
The Royal Opera is certainly milking Andrei Șerban’s 30-year-old production of Puccini’s last, unfinished opera for all its worth. But who can blame them, when the show looks so fabulous and chimes with the sadistic gorgeousness of the work so perfectly?
So exuberant are Șerban’s inventions and Sally Jacobs’s designs that they often steal the show. At one point we see a scimitar being prepared with slow relish against a giant grindstone, to dispatch Turandot’s latest victim. The executioner is a 7ft livid-green monster on a chariot pulled by black-cloaked slaves. Everyone is masked, to add to the sense that Turandot’s obsession with revenging her sex has drained her kingdom of humanity. The chorus look down at this savage parade from above, as if in a theatre. Rarely can they have had so little to do in terms of movement, but it didn’t matter as the swirl of colour below, expertly managed by revival director Andrew Sinclair, was so entrancing.
It could all have been a bit too much, had the gorgeousness not been tempered by subtlety. Though the bloodiness of Turandot’s regime was constantly evoked by the colour red, the moments of death were stylised, and mercifully gore-free. The dancers choreographed by Kate Flatt moved with the bewitching slowness of tai chi. Meanwhile in the pit, the orchestra under conductor Dan Ettinger relished the score’s strangely coloured moments of eerie menace, as much as the passages of brazen orientalist splendour.
The subtlety of the production wasn’t always matched by the singers. Christine Goerke had an appropriately steely, unmovable stage presence as Turandot, and summoned a blistering power in her repeated cry “no man shall possess me”, but her vowels were weirdly pinched – which admittedly added to our sense of her strangeness, but were hard on the ear. Latvian tenor Aleksandrs Antonenko as her would-be husband Calaf hit every top note with ringing authority, but was short on lyricism and seemed a stolid stage presence.
Much more engaging were the gleeful trio of Michel de Souza, Aled Hall and Pavel Petrov as Ping, Pang and Pong, and the dignified pathos of In Sung Sim as Timur. The sweet-toned Russian soprano Hibla Gerzmava as the pathetically self-sacrificing slave girl Liù provided the evening’s most moving moments, but isn’t that always the case? She is a rare shaft of light in a world of savage splendour and sadism, which this production catches to perfection.
Turandot is at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, until July 16. Tickets: 020 7304 4000