But it is known that amateurs give the best reviews, no? Turandot was spectacular, stately opera in its grandest form, where the singing struck straight at our soft pale cores, that scrunched-up spot where beauty and terror are two halves of a zygote. Principessa Turandot is "white as jade, cold as a blade". She sings like the breaking of some prelapsarian dawn, when a jealous, irrational God might, in his careful omniscience, deliberately nurture the seed of preordained doom. Her eventual fall (if one could call it that) is fastastically unconvincing, but enormously enjoyable and therefore apt.
Prince Calaf smiled once at the slave-girl Liu: smitten, she discharges automaton-like her morbid destiny, a love-drudge to the end, but not before spirals of redeeming song -- the young soprano, her voice pure and beauteous, was truly touching.
The chorus were dressed in Red Guard-inspired uniforms, faces coated in paint for very eerie effect. A mote more to be desired in each of the other costume designs, though they were effective enough, from afar.
Inherent incongruities, such as the innocent folk tune Mo Li Hua's transfiguration by Puccini's pyretic phantasy, did not detract from an extremely satisfying evening, though the orchestra could have been placed so that its more frenzied moments did not drown, sometimes, the singers' aerial melismas.
I cannot say more, an amateur is but so, alas. But you should have watched it. You know who you are. Ehehe. |

Watched on Saturday "Turandot" by the Savonlinna Opera Festival. Wonderful performance. |