Tag Archives: turandot

Arts & Entertainment, Music, Theatre

The Spectacular Riddle of Turandot in a “passionate, precise, and powerful performance”

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Lori Phillips (Turandot) - Photo © Elise Bakketun

Antonello Palombi (Calaf) - Photo © Elise Bakketun

Lina Tetriani (Liù) - Photo © Elise Bakketun

From left to right: Joseph Hu (Pong), Patrick Carfizzi (Ping), and Julius Ahn (Pang) - Photo © Elise Bakketun

Marcy Stonikas (Turandot) - Photo © Elise Bakketun

Luis Chapa (Calaf) - Photo © Elise Bakketun

Grazia Doronzio (Liù) - Photo © Elise Bakketun

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Turandot, Puccini’s final opera, is grand opera in the truest sense of the words. The chorus is numerous, the roles demand large voices, and the story is epic. And Seattle Opera’s production of Turandot (through August 18 at McCaw Hall; tickets) is equally as grand and sumptuous as the music.

The titular princess, Turandot, has declared that she will only marry a man who can successfully answer three riddles, and if he cannot, he will be beheaded. Many have tried; all have died. When a mysterious prince shows up to try his luck and actually answers all three riddles correctly, Turandot is reluctant (or scared out of her mind) to honor her word.

So the prince offers a riddle himself, saying that if she can correctly guess his name by the dawn, he will agree to die. What follows are a series of sacrifices and an ending which is arguably both happy and/or regrettable.

As if he knew this opera would be his last, Puccini crams as much drama and story as he can into every moment. Instead of an overture, BOOM! we’re in Turandot’s palace, with the chorus demanding blood. Characters are introduced quickly, and connections between them are established with lightning speed (the prince sees Turandot and BOOM! he’s in love; he smiled at a slave girl years ago and BOOM! she’s in love). Arias get a measure or two of introduction and occasionally no conclusion – the music rolls ever forward, and the drama isn’t interrupted by applause.

At McCaw Hall, the sets are larger than life, and transport you to Turandot’s Peking palace immediately. For as big as they are, they never dwarf the singers. The lighting and the costuming join the sets and the staging to create a dazzling spectacle. (One article of Turandot’s costume made several audience members gasp on opening night – keep an eye out for it if you go.) The fact that everything comes together as one is due to the French-Canadian duo Renaud Doucet (stage director) and André Barbe (set and costume designer). Lighting designer Guy Simard rounds out the team.

Trappings aside, the main event with any production of Turandot is the singing. Prince Calaf (that’s his name, don’t wear it out) is a demanding spinto tenor role (“spinto” means “push” in Italian, and any spinto voice type falls in between lyric and dramatic). Liù is a classic Puccini lyric soprano role. And the main event, Turandot, is generally defined as a Wagnerian, or ultra-dramatic, soprano. (Turandot is one of the few, if not the only, Italian soprano roles classified as “Wagnerian.”)

Seattle Opera has assembled two outstanding casts in the main roles. Sharing the role of Turandot are Lori Phillips and Marcy Stonikas (a former Seattle Opera Young Artist, singing August 5 and August 12). Of the two, I preferred Stonikas by a slight margin. Her voice was warm and round from the very beginning, and the music seemed to fit her like a glove; her high notes seemed effortless. She was emotionally connected to the icy princess, making the love story slightly more believable than it might otherwise be. Phillips also has a beautiful voice, but was working fairly hard to cut through the sound of the chorus and the orchestra, and her emotional connection to the role was slightly more tenuous (alternately, more icy, which might have been a deliberate character choice).

I also preferred Grazia Doronzio as Liù (singing  August 5, 8, and 12) to her opening night counterpart, Lina Tetriani. Doronzio was grounded and lyric for the duration of the role, and in glorious voice from top to bottom. Tetriani, on the other hand, had a habit of rising to her tiptoes for high notes, distracting me from the musical line and the unfolding drama.

As Calaf, Antonello Palombi and Luis Chapa (August 5 and 12) both did wonderful jobs. Chapa’s Calaf sounded a bit younger and smaller than Palombi’s, but was well sung from the very beginning. Palombi’s voice was a bit cold in the first act; some high notes lacked significant overtones. But by the second act, and for the rest of the opera, his voice was chillingly glorious. Both men did beautiful renditions of the opera’s most famous aria, “Nessun Dorma,” so anyone who goes to see Turandot just for this (and who would blame you?) will not be disappointed.

Rounding out the cast are Peter Rose as a powerful Timur, Peter Kazaras as the remote Emperor, Ashraf Sewailam as a consistent and committed Mandarin, and Patrick Carfizzi, Julius Ahn, and Joseph Hu as the opera’s comic relief, Ping, Pang and Pong (respectively). Some of the staging and costume choices for Ping, Pang, and Pong are the only aspects of the opera that pull away from the overbearing palace setting. In Act Two, the three men sing a sweet trio about all that they’ve left behind in order to be the executioner’s assistants, which becomes a vaudevillian song and dance before they’re called back to court.

A chorus this large, including both adults and children, can be hard to prepare and manage. Beth Kirchhoff has done a wonderful job with both. The large group is musically sensitive and responsive, handing phrases off beautifully both to each other and to the orchestra.

Asher Fisch led the orchestra in a passionate, precise, and powerful performance. With music like this, it would be easy for the orchestra to overpower even the strongest singers; Fisch walked the line between supportive and overpowering with sensitivity. He brought out Puccini’s orchestral colors beautifully, adding to the complete dramatic picture.

Arts & Entertainment, Music, Theatre

Turandot, the Music of The Nightingale, and Magic of Chinoiserie

Seattle Opera’s Turandot runs from August 4 to 18 at McCaw Hall.

In Puccini’s opera Turandot, based first on a play by Carlo Gozzi, with its roots in a much older Persian tale, you have one of the most popular operas of all time, about a formidable Chinese princess who tests her suitors, with the failures (and everyone fails) executed. While opera’s vocal meritocracy has long depended upon colorblind casting for many roles, it’s also true that most Turandots have not been Chinese, or Asian. (Seattle Opera’s sopranos, Lori Phillips and Marcy Stonikas, are from Rhode Island and Illinois, respectively.)

But audiences have generally agreed, except in particular cases, that skin color, along with size and age in opera, is “more of a guideline”–what matters is how well the performer sings and acts the role. Unless the character is supposed to be a specific hue, the colors of the voice matter more, in theory.

So imagine the perplexity of Moisés Kaufman and Spring Awakening‘s creative duo, Duncan Sheik and Steven Sater, when their new musical The Nightingale managed to ire the Asian acting community. A retelling of Hans Christian Andersen’s fable, about the Chinese emperor enthralled by first a real nightingale and then a mechanical version, The Nightingale, as workshopped at La Jolla Playhouse, featured a multiracial cast that was notably short on Asian actors, let alone specifically Chinese talent.

At a talkback (scheduled to address the blowback), Kaufman emphasized that this was, after all, a fable, set in a “mythic China”–a defense that did not seem to persuade an audience literate in cultural appropriation. After all, it would seem to advance the case for a strangely selective blindness if you include Chinese scenery and miss the people who should be in it, even if they are portrayed by an actually multiracial cast (as opposed to mainly Caucasian actors and a lonely hyphen-American).

That said, Andersen’s fable can be read many ways (including, reductively, as an allegory of his love for Jenny Lind), but is not usually hailed a pathbreaking work of cultural anthropology. Steven Sater told James Hebert that “we had a workshop that was fully Asian, and it’s not appropriate to the piece (we’ve written). It’s not about Asia.” It’s then that Sater brings up the term “chinoiserie.”

You could translate “chinoiserie” as “Chinese…ish,” if you want. It’s a cultural form of infatuation with the transfer student–in retrospect it may come to seem childish and superficial. But initially, there’s a flush of novelty, a flash of curiosity, and a fleshing out of another inner life through trial and error, mostly error. (In a similar way, knock-offs of products are usually not very good, most fail, and a few develop into something so good they rival the original–witness Japan’s whisky.)

Opera records many of these cross-cultural erotic attractions, sometimes intra-European, sometimes extra-, and the lesson is usually binary: Either the attractive foreigner is in basic ways just like us (Romance!), or in equally fundamental ways, not (Tragedy!). It’s not just about drama in scenic pagodas. Here’s conductor Asher Fisch on the ways Puccini worked the pentatonic and hijaz modes into Turandot‘s score, while reserving heart-pounding harmonies for the big emotions. (For Puccini, down deep everyone was an Italian opera fan, and history does seem to support his thesis.)

While they look to have so much in common, the hurdle that The Nightingale seems to face that Turandot doesn’t is that the The Nightingale was born today, while Turandot was born yesterday. Turandot is inextricably part of culture, an object with history; outside of your personal immersion (or not) in its story, it’s much like a grandparent’s faded photograph of that long-ago heartbreaker.

Its failings (three spring to mind, Ping, Pang, and Pong, which have to be carefully contextualized as commedia rather than casually racist) are those of another generation. It’s not so authentic in its depiction of China as in its failure to do so (authenticity is the more prized the more we struggle to identify ourselves–as cultures homogenize, cultural authenticity becomes a fetish, where liberals stash their conservatism). It is successful because “ice princess” turns out to be an archetype: Either you have tried to win someone’s heart, or you have been caught between your own head and heart’s contradictory urgings. (The true ice princess is not unfeeling, but feeling and frozen.)

Today, in La Jolla, you can’t simply wave a wand and call your China “mythic”–not because anyone in China knows or cares, necessarily, but because there are so many Americans of Chinese descent who bristle at it, and are willing to remind you that they’re in the audience.

Frankly, this is why mythic is adjective best applied by succeeding generations. Art is born in the here and now, out of material and immaterial phenomena, and it is in conversations like this that you get to see why it matters that people make art, rather than simply ingest the classics. Art may be a list of the problems of our time, but at least they are our problems.