How curious. I learned what this Turandot had been about only upon consulting the programme post-performance. To be honest, I wish I had not done so. A quotation from La Fura del Baus’s website will do: ‘In 2046 Europe is completely under Chinese rule. More than 30 years, China had rescued Europe from a financial crisis by buying up the debt, the ownership and natural resources. China is now the new world power. Turandot, the princess of ice control, as “Big Brother” every European, in order to pay back every last penny and pay off the debt of their parents’ generation.’ There is, I suppose, nothing like a bit – a lot – of paranoid Western Sinophobia to knock the work’s tamer racism into perspective. How this was depicted onstage I am at a loss to describe, but there you have it.
For, if that sounds like the sort of thing a US Republican might utter or like to hear, what we saw often suggested something devised to hold the attention of an octogenarian man-baby president. There was certainly something going on all the time: less an evocation of the circus, or on engagement with the idea of one, commedia dell’arte or otherwise, than a circus in itself. If not so vacuous as, say, the Cirque du soleil, Carlus Pedrussa’s production was not so far off as it appeared to think itself. Breakdancers, acrobats, roller-skaters: someone was and often many people were doing something or many things all of the time. Quite why remained obscure, at least to me. I wondered whether some comment was being made about visual overload, and perhaps it was. But its relation to Turandot I could only hazard to tell you, until the final scene when things calmed down and the characters were directed rather well. Titles instructed us when to put on our 90s-style 3-D glasses, red and blue, which promised far more than they delivered. Apart from turning much of what we saw, well, red and blue, they enabled us to see a few objects flying around between us and the stage. Spectacle has always been a dramatic – or, indeed a postdramatic – tool in opera. Here, I am afraid, things tended towards Wagner’s celebrated denunciation of Meyerbeer as effect without cause.
Pedrussa’s decision – again, I quote La Fura del Baus’s website – to present a Turandot ‘strictly pure and original’ might suggest conflict, productive or otherwise, with visual hyperactivity. Did it ‘respect the composer’s music’? Arguably so, in that it presented it as one might expect, save for one exception of ultra-‘respect’, ending ‘when the choir says “Liú poesía”.’ I had not heard it done this way before, so was curious to discover how it might turn out. Not very well, alas. It can plausibly be argued that there is no entirely satisfactory solution to this particular problem, not even Berio’s—and certainly not Franco Alfano’s. But this not only sounded quite at odds with what we had seen; it also presented an oddly muted winding down to an opera for which subtlety may hardly be a priority, but tonal dramaturgic strategy certainly is. Wozzeck stops rather than closes; no one would wish it otherwise. For Turandotmore or less to peter out proved an unnecessary disappointment.
Andrea Battistoni’s conducting of the Munich orchestra offered a proverbial curate’s egg. Tremendous Stravinskian precision early on, hammering home Puccini’s inheritance from Petrushka and The Rite of Spring, met with frustrating listlessness later on. If the reading never lost sight of the gorgeousness of the orchestral tapestry, relative lack of structural command doubtless contributed to the disappointment of the close. Much was loud, very loud, although considerably more varied in tone than Yonghoon Lee’s ear-splitting Calaf. Again, this may not be the world’s most subtle opera; nor is Calaf’s the most of operatic characterisation. There is nonetheless more to it, or should be, than unrelieved shouting. Sondra Radvanovsky was cold and imperious as Turandot, and considerably subtler in, say, ‘In questa reggia’. It was difficult not to feel the loss of additional music in her case. Golda Schultz’s Liù was heart-rending: lovelorn and sincere, a star-turn without trying to be a ‘star’. Christian Can Horn’s verbally and musically attentive Timur impressed similarly for adding much that was absent elsewhere. Indeed, all the singing, bar that of Lee, was of excellent quality or better, massed choral forces included. I could only wish the singers – and we – had benefited from a production that had extended beyond School of Franco Zeffirelli, albeit more by default than design.
Mark Berry
Turandot
Composed by Giacomo Puccini
Libretto in Italian by Giuseppe Adami and Renato Simoni
Cast and Production Staff:
Turandot – Sondra Radvanovsky; Altoum – Kevin Conners; Timur – Christian Van Horn; Calaf – Yonghoon Lee; Liù – Golda Schultz; Ping – Vitor Bispo; Pang – Tansel Akzeybek; Pong, Prince of Persia – Samuel Stopford; Mandarin – Bálint Szabó.
Director – Carlus Pedrussa/La Fura del Baus; Designs – Roland Olbeter; Costumes – Chu Oruz; Video – Franc Aleu; Lighting – Urs Schönebaum; Dramaturgy – Andrea Schönhofer, Rainer Karlitschek; Revival director – Lejila Selfried. Chorus, Children’s Chorus, and Extra Chorus of the Bayerische Staatsoper (chorus director: Christoph Hell); Extras, Children Extras, and Opera-Ballet of the Bayerische Staatsoper; Bayerisches Staatsorchester. Conductor – Andrea Battistoni.
Nationaltheater, Munich, 30 June 2026
All photos © Geoffroy Schied