In the centenary of the opera’s posthumous premiere, there can be few more atmospheric places to get your dose of Turandot than at Tuscany’s Puccini Festival. Not only do you have the natural beauty of the lake shore on which the festival’s opera stage is built, but the audience sits a mere stone’s throw away from the house in Torre del Lago where Puccini wrote most of the opera and where his body was laid to rest after his death in 1924.
So there might have been a little touch of magic in the air for this opening performance of the festival, and there was definitely a sense that the festival had realised they had a responsibility to do this well. The souvenir programme booklet contained glossy photographs from all the productions they had staged over the years, and the one they revived for this year was the one with beautifully traditional designs by Ezio Frigerio, here with new direction credited to Pier Francesco Maestrini. It’s as though the festival chose for the centenary the grandest, most straightforwardly beautiful production in their repertoire, and they also pulled out the stops to get a dashed impressive artistic team to perform it for the festival’s opening night. Casting varies hugely throughout the festival, but this opening performance felt decidedly A-List.
The performances at Torre del Lago take place on open-air stages with some (relatively discrete) amplification, and when that happens you can’t help but lose some of the focus and concentration that the sound would have inside a theatre. However, the playing and the technical wizardry meant that the orchestra sounded great as conducted by Marco Armiliato, an experienced hand who knows both his context and his audience: there’s no point dialling things down when you’re performing under the stars, and the opera’s bombastic climaxes were duly leaned into. However there was plenty of detail in the sound, with some of the delicacy coming through, albeit with the aid of the microphones, and the production had some eye for detail amidst the orientalist spectacle and the grandeur of the crowd scenes. Turandot’s gestures, for example, melted from stylised hostility into fluid warmth as Acts 2 and 3 progressed, and Liù’s body language was always fragile and mobile in contrast, leaning into her status as the opera’s victim.
Armiliato’s approach suited Roberto Alagna, whose Calaf had clarion strength and bags of macho personality, singing with such power that he could probably have done without the amplification. That said, the sheer forward thrust of his voice led to some strain in a riddle scene that became blustery, and he sounded under pressure at the end of “Nessun dorma”. Furthermore, the slurs between his phrases became very distracting, going way beyond what most people would understand by portamento.
Every bit as powerful, but altogether more controlled and more impressive, was Anna Pirozzi as Turandot. She sang with an accurate laser beam of sound, nothing seeming difficult or even much of an effort, taking everything completely in her stride, which is quite remarkable in this difficult role. In total contrast, Aleksandra Kurzak’s Liù was the embodiment of vulnerable delicacy, floating a gorgeous soft line with pinprick accuracy, particularly at the pianissimo end of “Signore ascolta”. Lesser roles were well cast, too, with a characterful Ping, Pang and Pong, who shared the stage effectively with their acrobat body doubles, and both Andrea Vittorio De Campo’s Timur and Filippo Pina Castiglioni‘s Emperor made a far bigger impact than their roles do in many productions. The chorus gave it plenty of welly, and were all the better for it.
So yes, you had to contend with the planes taking off from nearby Pisa Airport and the occasional siren going off in the background, but that’s par for the course with outdoor performances like this. They didn’t get in the way of some genuinely impressive singing and some magical atmosphere.
