Puccini: Turandot DVD (The Royal Opera) 2013

Turandot: A curates egg.

I did not like the production at all, but the singing and a lot of the acting was superb. Turandot was far more human than normally played so that you could see the frightened woman behind the imperious princess, and that she was terrified of men. At the same time Calaf briefly caught her eye the very first time they were on stage together, which indicated that there was an attraction from the beginning.. Lieu was very moving and received a much deserved ovation from the audience, while Calaf was the weakest of the three, not because it was a bad performance but because it was ordinary in a performance where the other two major principals were exceptional. Ping, Pang and Pong were more interesting than usual with well developed personalities and their scene at the beginning of Act 2 was touching. Placing the chorus in a theatre at the back of the stage annoyed me because it cut them out of the action. The Persion Prince as a child made no sense. He didn't look old enough to have ravaged Turandot if he had answered the three riddles, and I think you feel sympathetic to all of Turandot's victims, and not any more so because he is a child. I hate masked singers or actors on stage because it makes it very difficult for them to portray any emotional sense, and I was glad that Turandot removed hers in key scenes because it made her more real as a person. At the same time the staging and performances on the whole seemed be trying to make the characters remote from the audience. I thought the costumes were okay without any attempt to indicate the social class differences of the cast, and didn't convey any of the magnificence normally present in this opera. Overall like the curates egg, I thought it was good in parts, and I wondered whether the characterisations that I admired were a standard part of the production or more likely given the whole staging, attributes of some of the individual singers in this particular revival of the production.