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Alden and Turandot are made for one another. It is updated, of course, and like Dream has an enclosing claustrophobic set, with costumes suggesting a totalitarian regime, though it is postmodern enough to include dilapidated emperors. You can tell the tenor hero because he wears a shabby dark overcoat, now obligatory among trendy directors for tenor heroes. Turandot, when she finally appears to sing, is power-dressed but nervous, a brilliant stroke which makes her aria ‘In questia reggia’ more unnerving than usual. Portraits of her luckless suitors cover the walls in Act I: by my count 108, who all failed to solve what have always seemed to me three absurdly easy riddles — and I’ve never been able to solve one in a Christmas cracker.
Even admirers of Turandot admit that the scene in Act III in which the slave girl Liù is tortured to get her to reveal Calaf’s name, and kills herself rather than reveal it, while Calaf, who had previously seemed quite fond of her, looks on in unconcern, is hard to take. Alden, in a conversation in the programme, agrees, and says he gets round it by making Liù and Timur ‘ghosts or memories from Calaf’s past’, so that nothing really happens to her. But that makes incoherent the scene between her and Turandot, who, not knowing love, wonders how Liù can endure the agonies she has commanded.
By that point in the opera one questions how any of the characters dares to talk of Love. All those slain suitors didn’t know Turandot at all, they only saw her, so it’s only desire that is in question, and oddly this is Puccini’s second least erotic opera. Notoriously he was unable to finish it because Turandot and Calaf were to end happily united in the unilluminated condition of fulfilled love. Alfano manfully did what he could with Puccini’s sketches, and has been vilified ever since, and usually heavily pruned. WNO presents Alfano complete, and it is dreadfully unsatisfactory, but Puccini had set himself a riddle he certainly couldn’t solve.
The performance is tremendous, however. When in need of a Turandot Wales calls on Anna Shafajinskaia, and she delivers the goods, hurling her challenges at the Calaf of Gwyn Hughes Jones, who answers them with thrilling aplomb. He manages to sing with abandoned Italianità, which makes Act II a great athletic event; and he sails through ‘Nessun dorma’ as if he were the first person ever to sing it. Rebecca Evans is so moving a Liù that her music shows that Puccini never lost his heart, even if he sometimes misplaced it for extended periods. The minor parts, including the bureaucratic trio of Ping, Pang and Pong, are all taken admirably, and Lothar Koenigs conducts with a ferocity which I have never heard in this piece before, and which is exactly what it needs.
Who could deny that Alden gets to the core of this opera much more than productions of fussy chinoiserie — the orchestra provides quite enough of that — and extended fingernails?
The evening before was dismal, a new production of Così fan tutte which took Mozart’s subtlest and most painful comedy and turned it literally into an end-of-pier romp. The cast list is ominous. The two young guys who the ‘elderly philosopher’ Alfonso gets to test the fidelity of their fiancées are described as ‘Italian sailors stationed in a British seaside town’, while Alfonso is an ‘Italian immigrant and local pier entertainer’, with Despina a ‘young single mother of Italian descent, working in Botticelli’s ice cream parlour and guesthouse’. Così could survive all that, but it is played only for laughs — and not all that many were forthcoming. The director Benjamin Davis talks in the programme of depth and cynicism, but he seems wholly unable to present anything more than slapstick with wry one-liners.
Musically, under the baton of Daniele Rustioni, things go smoothly, but again there is nothing searching, nobody suffers more than they would in a Rossini farce, and Mozart is as far removed from that as possible. The Overture accompanies locals and visitors taking their dogs for a walk, with canine flirtations and near-fights, and that is about as serious as any of it gets; and also about as funny.
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