Hockney’s Fantastical ‘Turandot’ in L.A. Melts Chinese Ice with Italian Fire
/By Truman C. Wang
5/20/2024
Photo credit: Cory Weaver | L.A. Opera
2024 is the 100th anniversary of Puccini’s death. In the same month, Delaware and Washington D.C. are also staging Turandot, but with new endings written by Chinese-American composers. The L.A. Opera staging, opened yesterday, May 18, is, in my estimation, the most significant of the three. It features iconic set by a renowned British painter and an ending by Franco Alfano, however flawed, sanctioned by the composer’s son and closest friends. While it is fashionable in today’s political climate to engage Chinese composers to finish, even revise, Puccini’s Chinese-themed opera, we must remember that Turandot is an Italian opera, and the composer knew exactly how it should end musically. Much has been made of Puccini’s struggle and delay for three years (1921-24) to melt a barbaric icy princess. The fact is – it was clear from the outset what the composer wanted. In 1921, Puccini wrote to Adami, one of the librettists, at the start of their collaboration, “It must be a great duet. These two almost superhuman beings are transformed by love into human beings, and love takes possession of all on the stage in a great orchestral peroration.” The delay was all due to Adami’s tardiness; he did not deliver the final text until October 8, 1924, two days before Puccini set out for Brussels for cancer treatment, never to return.
David Hockney’s scenery for Turandot, which I first saw in San Francisco in 1992, is a fantastical, colorful, and effective evocation of China, not a literal representation. In an interview, Mr. Hockney admitted he’s a painter by profession and had to learn how to collaborate in opera. He did an excellent job with Turandot. Together with costume designer Ian Falconer and lighting designer Thomas Munn (recreated for L.A. by Gary Marder), Hockney’s fabric-and-wood set, heavy on Chinese red and featuring “harsh edges, strong diagonals, mad perspectives” (his own words), evokes beguiling chinoiserie dragons and pagoda roofs as if they were illustrations in a children’s book. It’s 30 feet high but blends well with the performers on stage (some 128 strong) and does not swallow them up like the gargantuan Franco Zeffirelli show at the Met.
The dramatic lighting follows Puccini’s music faithfully and shines bright colors – and the corresponding emotional tensions – on the choristers’ painted whiteface, during the riddles scene, and in the three ministers’ nostalgic reminiscence of their old house in Hunan (a house is artistically projected onto the scrim of a Chinese brush painting.)
Garnett Bruce, the director, made good use of Hockney’s people-friendly set to move the parade of Turandot’s condemned suitors from a piazza on the left to a deep narrow alley on the right. In lieu of the customary opera ballet, we have the uncredited Beijing acrobats jumping and backflipping down, up, and across the stage in eye-popping, gravity-defying stunts. The main characters are placed strategically based on their ranks, with Turandot and Calàf reversing positions after he solves the three riddles and now has her at his mercy. The slave girl Liù, the drama’s human and emotional core, is seen in stage front center, as the curtain falls on act two.
Guanqun Yu was a fine Liù, ending her aria “Signore ascolta” in a beautifully poignant messa di voce on the high B-flat; her suicide, after confronting the icy princess with a defiant "Tu che di gel sei cinta", was heartbreaking. Perhaps in concession to today’s gender politics, the grief-stricken Calàf’s line “My little Liù, you’re dead!” has the word “little (piccola)” removed in the translation. (I know Italian and occasionally glance up to check the supertitles; this one happened to catch my eye.)
Angela Meade, the Turandot, has a powerful and vigorous soprano. The role (and the sizeable orchestra) seemed to hold no terrors for her. Her tone was firm and unwavering. Her singing was strong and unflagging. It was also a performance with subtlety and delicacy – when describing the plight of Turandot’s ancestor Lo-u-Ling in “In questa reggia”, and uttering the word “amore” in the final duet. As Calàf, Russell Thomas’ tenor is smaller in size but no less gripping. His singing was mellifluous and his high-C in “Nessun dorma” did not disappoint. This prince sounded appropriately romantic and aristocratic, a welcome relief from a long line of thickset tenors crying the music with the full force of their lungs, lustily and crudely.
Bass Morris Robinson was a noble Timur singing in firmly focused tones. The Ping, Pang, Pong trio were sung and acted earnestly, without stereotype, by Ryan Wolfe, Terrence Chin-Loy and Julius Ahn, respectively. Rounding out this exceptional cast were Ashley Faatoalia’s Emperor Altoum and Alan Williams’ Mandarin. The choruses, both adult and children, sang and acted movingly.
I was also moved by the urgent lyricism of James Conlon’s conducting and the orchestra’s energetic, magical playing – the furious timpani strikes in the riddles scene, the delicate harp and violins in the Ping Pang Pong trio, and the wailing piccolos as Liù’s dead body is carried away (the last operatic notes that Puccini wrote). The final “Nessun dorma” chorus rang out in glorious high B’s and C’s in a blazing ‘orchestral peroration’, exactly as the composer had prescribed.
Other Turandot dates are May 26, 30, June 2, 5, 8.
Truman C. Wang is Editor-in-Chief of Classical Voice, whose articles have appeared in the Pasadena Star-News, San Gabriel Valley Tribune, other Southern California publications, as well as the Hawaiian Chinese Daily. He studied Integrative Biology and Music at U.C. Berkeley.