‘Turandot’ takes flight in final act
The third and final act of Puccini’s “Turandot” is, famously, when everything falls apart. This is when the insoluble contradictions of the opera’s plot — the expectation that the audience can be made to care about a love conceived in an instant and built on a foundation of torture and death — become unsustainable.
Yet on Friday, Sept. 8, when “Turandot” opened the new San Francisco Opera season at the War Memorial Opera House, the last act was the point at which everything came together. All the principal singers began to blossom afresh. The conducting of Music Director Nicola Luisotti — who would end the evening by receiving the San Francisco Opera Medal in recognition of his nine years of service to the company — took on new concision and urgency.
And the entire undertaking, which up until that juncture had emerged as a reasonably forceful though hardly revelatory take on a familiar classic, began to send out some muchneeded sparks.
If getting everything into focus required a certain degree of patience on the part of patrons, well, patience is always part of the opening-night experience. There are speeches and acknowledgments to be made, and intermissions are extended to allow for the circulation of elegant or imaginative raiment.
But “Turandot” itself, which for some reason is always entrusted to the company’s season-opener slot whenever it’s revived (a tradition extending back unbroken for nearly 20 years), ideally wants to come out of the gate with a bit more of a bang. If nothing else, that helps the audience focus on the inventive beauty of Puccini’s writing — a melange of lush melody and angular, brilliantly orchestrated jabs — rather than dwelling too attentively on the work’s manifest dramatic shortcomings.
The challenges with “Turandot” go beyond the glib Orientalism it shares with the composer’s “Madama Butterfly” (a point touched on in a thoughtful program essay by General Director Matthew Shilvock) to encompass basic matters of psychology and dramaturgy.
The title character, a steely Chinese princess who scorns love and the entire male gender in an attempt to avenge the rape of an ancestor from centuries ago, never transcends her porcelain grandeur to take on a human dimension. And that in turn makes the tenor’s love for her — a love so overpowering he’s willing to sacrifice everything for it, including the safety of his aged father and the life of the devoted slave girl Liù — feel more tawdry than profound.
Puccini and his librettists struggled with these issues unsuccessfully, and when the composer died in 1924, he left the piece unfinished. Still, a performance that drives as securely as Friday’s did toward the conclusion can do a lot to sweep away doubts.
Brian Jagde, the former Adler Fellow who in recent seasons has become the company’s go-to tenor (especially for Puccini), undertook the role of Calaf for the first time, and rose admirably to the assignment. His singing is a display of muscular exertion, not always without a touch of strain, but always shapely and direct. And in the famous showpiece “Nessun dorma,” which begins the third act, Jagde combined sinew and tonal clarity in an irresistible alloy.
Turandot was soprano Martina Serafin, previously heard here only in two performances of Richard Strauss’ “Der Rosenkavalier” a decade ago. On this occasion, she took a little while to modulate her brawny, occasionally acidic sound to the specifics of the hall. That was unfortunate only because Turandot’s most daunting and exposed singing, in the Act 2 aria “In questa reggia,” is the first thing the soprano has to undertake.
Yet again, by Act 3, Serafin’s performance, which was stately and theatrically commanding throughout, had acquired a degree of warmth and emotional transparency to go along. The effect was to make Turandot’s eventual softening and acquiescence to the power of love something audible and even plausible.
As Liù, Adler Fellow Toni Marie Palmertree (a late addition to the cast), delivered a performance of wondrous poignancy and heroism — not so much in the Act 1 aria “Signore, ascolta” as in her final act of self-sacrifice, clothed in vigorous, expressive phrasing. Bass Raymond Aceto was a sonorous presence as the old, blind patriarch Timur; Joo Won Kang, Julius Ahn and Joel Sorensen cavorted gaily as the government officials Ping, Pang and Pong, but sounded overmatched vocally. Ian Robertson’s Opera Chorus made a vibrant sound that didn’t always cohere.
The other long-standing “Turandot” tradition in San Francisco is the use of designer David Hockney’s vivid, sanguinary production, a whirl of swooping lines cloaked in nightmarish reds and greens with similarly unsettling costumes by Ian Falconer. It’s a creation so distinctive that by rights it should have lost any sense of novelty by now, but together with the pointed stage direction of Garnett Bruce, it continues to underscore perfectly the alarming power of Puccini’s work.