Royal Opera’s Turandot revival is a blazing masterpiece — review

In the two decades that Antonio Pappano has spent as music director of London’s Royal Opera House, his most memorable nights have often come from Puccini, but there is one Puccini opera he has never conducted — until now.

Turandot, left unfinished at the composer’s death, is based on a fable, far from the human dramas the composer had favoured until then. Pappano says he long avoided it for that reason, but in preparing these performances and his recent recording he came to admire how Puccini had created an entirely different type of theatre.

That is what comes across so powerfully here. With Pappano and the Royal Opera orchestra on top form, the music glitters with invention at every turn, showing how brilliantly Puccini turned his hand to the grand ceremonial that is such a feature of the opera. Turandot has not sounded so blazing a masterpiece, even going back to 1984 when this production was new.

It remains a visually resplendent show, a tribute to its designer Sally Jacobs, who died in 2020. The director was Andrei Serban, who fused a magpie collection of ritual, fantasy, traditional Chinese opera and Italian commedia dell’arte into a foolproof whole. The production has hardly aged, so suggestions that it should be replaced seem unwise. The dice are heavily loaded against its successor.

A dozen performances in this revival are shared between two casts. On the first night, Anna Pirozzi was poised between a lyric and dramatic soprano in the title role, finding more variety in Turandot’s music than some, while turning up the volume for the big moments. Her Calaf, Yonghoon Lee, was also expressive and did not stint the decibels, though it sometimes sounded as if he was pushing his voice to its limit. The role of Liù is a lovely fit for Masabane Cecilia Rangwanasha, whose radiant soprano effortlessly filled the theatre — a fine revival.

★★★★☆

A generation after Turandot’s 1926 premiere, fantasy had gone firmly out of fashion. The postwar era saw the rise of the socially aware composer; Hans Werner Henze, a sometime Marxist sympathiser, was one of the leaders in the field.

Now it is his politically charged works of the 1960s that have gone out of fashion, but an intense performance of El Cimarrón at London’s Wigmore Hall showed how they can still pack a punch. This chamber work dates from the period when Henze lived in Cuba and it sets extracts from the oral memoirs of then 103-year-old Esteban Montejo, former slave and Cuban revolutionary. Mostly, the text is recited in heightened speech, though it breaks into song now and again. Its harrowing story was fervently declaimed by American baritone Will Liverman, a vivid and impressively clear narrator.

The accompaniment of three leading instrumentalists — percussionist Owen Gunnell with flautist Adam Walker and guitarist Sean Shibe also doubling on percussion — illustrates the events of the slaves’ suffering and rebellion, mostly in oblique manner. The hardline corps of 1960s music is heard less often these days, but the timelessness of the subject means that El Cimarrón, of all Henze’s political works, is likely to live on.

★★★☆☆

‘Turandot’ to April 13, roh.org.uk

wigmore-hall.org.uk