Puccini: Turandot -- Vienna PO/Gergiev [DVD]

Yes, and all at the same time, in spite of sounding contradictory. For mind you, this is no ordinary Turandot. From the musical point of view it has the important attractiveness of presenting Luciano Berio's ending, composed as an alternative to the well known by Alfano in use since the 1920's and that per se sets it apart. The cast in this 2002 Salzburg Festival production is typical of today's globalised world in which italian operas are sometimes given without a single italian in the cast. Singing quality will be not to everyone's liking and not precisely because of the lack of italianita in the principals' voices as a consequence of the absence of italians, but rather because of the very condition of the voices in some of them. Gallardo-Domas's and Schnaut's are the most questionable; one thing is vibrato and quite another is wobble. I recall attending a Turandot performance in San Francisco some 12 years ago (available in dvd, by the way) in which Eva Marton's wobble was so obtrusive as to make sitting throughout the whole performance almost intolerable; Schnaut and Gallardo-Domas don't "sin" to that extreme in this set but are certainly questionable, especially if you laid out over 300 euros for the entrance ticket at the Grosses Festpielhaus. The german singer's problems seem to derive from plain voice wear (she's been around for close to 30 years now, and that certainly counts, with all due respect), the chilean's sound more like the effect of an ill-conceived effort of stressing a voice unsuitable to such a large venue as the Grosses Festpielhaus. Burchuladze's voice has also deteriorated importantly along the years but the range the Timur part moves into allows him to keep wobble under reasonable control and he still commands an engaging timbre. Botha acquits himself well, to me he is the better singer of the lot and I'd propose most of the problems variously commented in the press are attributable more to microphone placing and his distance (or nearness) to them, this being a live performance. His is not a large voice, granted, but he's no tenorino either, perhaps the ORF engineers had to make allowances in microphone placing so the tuxedoed and pearled audience would not complain too much. And yes, the orchestra sometimes overpowers the singers but in so richly scored a piece this would be normal in the theatre. Tear still has a lot of voice left and projects a fine Emperor and Ping, Pang and Pong are quite good. The VPO play very well and with their usual refinement, their golden sound a definitive plus in this score; Gergiev seems to stress the 20th Century aspects of the score more than others who from that perspective appear to aim at pushing Puccini 30 years backwards: you end up hearing orchestral details that you'd seldom spot unless you were following the performance with a printed score, that do make you realise Puccini did study the music being composed by his contemporaries rather closely.

There are some very stunning ideas in Pountney's stage proposition, others that seem not to work as well. In no way I'd dismiss it outrightly as "eurotrashy" as many US commentators seem to imply. Acts 2 and 3 seem to work out better than the first one. The setting for the riddle solving scene is most impressive, with the Ice Princess atop a 9-metre high thing inside a gigantic human head (reproduced in the dvd's cover) that all of a sudden comes down to stage-level when Calaf divines the third riddle, as if implying Turandot's sudden crash into human-ness unless she can in her turn solve the riddle posed her by the unknown prince. As the third act evolves, the ugly world of dehumanisation portrayed in the first two acts progressively becomes human, until for the closing pages all is resolved into, yes, human-ness. An intriguing concept that well escapes the traditional stagings and certainly worlds apart from Zhang Yimou's beautiful Peking venture that Mehta conducted and which makes use of the Alfano completion.

And what about Berio's ending? Well, definitely count me in among the ones who consider it as more suited to the work than Alfano's. In all likelihood both endings will coexist, but Berio, by his making far more use than Alfano of Puccini's sketches whilst avoiding the imitation of a language that is not his, is more "on target" than what Alfano's mimickry of Puccini's style and grandiose utterances achieved: it (Berio's) sounds so more sincere ...

An interestingly different account of Turandot for the Salzburg Festival of 2002 without the usual Alfano completion of the 3rd Act -it is completed here by Luciano Berio. David Pountney's setting is a political allegory of a nightmarish oppression and brutality of the population, with robot-like figures and instruments of torture replacing the limbs of the three Masks. Liu (Christina Gallardo-Domas) is the most impressive of the principals -both vocally and in acting ability, and whilst Gabriele Schnaut gives a competent account as Turandot, Johan Botha is less convincing as Calaf. The audience's post performance appreciation accords with this. Berio's finale is more contemplative and less triumphalist than Alfano's and uses an orchestral interlude following Liu's death to explain Turandot's conversion. This almost suceeds but the change in music style is too obvious to be fully convincing. The VPO under Gergiev performs the difficult score well but the overall sound balance lacks detail and clarity compared to the best CD versions. Overall an interesting and visually stimulating alternative to the Bejing DVD but is musically less satisfactory.