Madtown Sights & Sounds: Madison Opera's Turandot

The Madison Opera launched its new season at Overture Hall last night with Turandot. For once, I was ahead of the game and ordered tickets early enough this summer to get front row mezz seats, positioned just right of centerstage. My husband was primed for this performance of his favorite opera, but I needed to do a little work to inoculate myself from my usual reaction to Puccini heroines ('oh, get over yourself'), so I spent some time this past week listening to my husband's vinyls of Turandot in its Nilsson I and Nilsson II incarnations. (As it turns out, I prefer the orchestra under Leinsdorf [Nilsson I] over Molinari-Pradelli [Nilsson II], but Franco Corelli's Calaf [Nilsson II] is the one that softens my frosty heart.)

The best word for the performance: wow. The David Hockney sets were brilliant, a cartoony hallucination of bright colors and exaggerated shadows. The Madison Symphony played gorgeously from the sunken orchestra pit (which fronts the entire stage, rather than being sited off to one side of the hall, and was nicely visible from our seats), with the discipline needed to give meaningful form and shape to the music (which is sometimes a challenge with Puccini, I think). And the singing was universally superb. Ted Lee (the tenor from Korea...paisan! sort of) sang a wonderful Calaf with powerful yet subtly calibrated emotions, and, yes, his "Nessum dorma" actually sent shivers down my spine. Barbara Quintiliani's Liù really stood out (which was no small feat given the array of exceptional performers) with a voice that tenderly drew the listener in. And the ministers Ping, Pang, Pong (Frank Hernandez, Joel Burcham, Matthew Lord) moved nimbly from comic relief to the brief yet beautiful (and my favorite) interlude of "Ho una casa nell'Honan":

I have a house in Honan
with a little pond so blue,
all surrounded by bamboo,
And here I am, wasting my life,
racking my brains over sacred books...

It was wonderful to experience Overture Hall for the first time with such a thrilling performance. But I have a bone to pick with Signore Puccini (or shall we blame Franco Albano, who completed the opera after Puccini's death): I hate this story. Turandot, the cruel, murderous, man-hating ice princess (a combo of the goddess Diana and Andrea Dworkin, if you get the picture), gets to ride off into a happily-ever-after sunset with Calaf, who suffers permanent terminal brain suction from the second he's in her presence. Feh. I'm not saying that Liù, the faithful, humble, loving slave girl who worships and sacrifices herself for Calaf, should have ended up with him, because that would have been bogus too. But Turandot's false and unjust transformation just...bugs me, and as for Calaf, I guess he never gets to learn that ugly is as ugly does.

Comments

[Don]

Yes, beautiful,haunting music, and one very cold story. Our sympathies are with Liu, and the father, but hardly for the princess or the man who woos her.

There was a review in Sunday's NYT Book Review about a new translation of the first five books of the Bible. The reviewer remarked that the translator, in his opening commentary, doesn't gloss over the details of stories like Abraham about to slaughter his son Isaac, which we almost don't see.

I mention that because sometimes stories in Genesis and definitely stories in operas have to be secondary to the music of the story.

BTW, I have a hard time with both Rigoletto and Il Travatore, too, when I am looking closely at the story.

[Chan S.]

It's funny how undeserved happiness in the story arc bothers me so much more than a tragic fate befalling sympathetic characters. Liu was the character I liked the best (of course), and I should have also mentioned in the post that Timur was wonderfully sung and acted by Robert Charles Austin. There's an interesting bit from the program notes, which says that at the opera's premiere at LaScala, Toscanini ended the opera with the funeral procession for Liu, that being the last of Puccini's music. For me, I think that would have ended things on a high note (er, so to speak), especially with Timur's most poignant line: "I will follow to rest beside you in the night which knows no dawn!".