Revisionism or not?

In my years as a resident of New York, I often watched the Metropolitan Opera’s 1987 Franco Zeffirelli production of “Turandot”, which is breathtakingly pretty even on a sixth viewing. Still, I always remember the New York friend who, when I invited him to join me for one cast of it, politely declined my invitation. He explained that, in view of the often grim subject matter of “Turandot” (the libretto has one prince decapitated in Act One and his head publicly displayed), he needed a more Regie (directorially reimagined) “Turandot” than the Met’s.

I hope he’d be satisfied with Covent Garden’s production, staged in 1984 by Andrei Serban and currently revived there until February 4. Here “Turandot” is colourful but never pretty-pretty: the decapitated head of the Prince of Persia is one of its many piercing images, as is the giant whetstone for the executioner’s axe.

As conducted by Daniel Oren, the current revival is too slow. It’s nonetheless riveting. Kate Flatt’s choreography – ten dancers do Asian movements, often based on T’ai chi, but often close to the stylised movement given to surrounding characters – works gloriously in slow motion, adding a suspensively ritualistic quality to the narrative.

Above all, the first four performances (up to Christmas) have the Turandot of Anna Netrebko. Her huge and many-coloured voice – often dark and bright at the same time, wonderfully capable of changing from loud to soft, from  public to private, and now based more firmly than ever in a sumptuous chest register in which her words register incisively – transforms this familiar role. And her physicality is riveting, exemplifying the production’s stylisation of gesture to clarify Turandot’s psychological journey from resisting love to succumbing to it. No Turandot of my experience has shown so clearly the milestones of her gradual admission that she, too, is in love.

The loud tenor voice of her Azerbajani ex-husband Yusif Eyvazov is never first-class – it has a strangely bottled-up reverberance – but, apart from his relentless insistence on volume, is admirable in strength, diction, and length of line. Masabane Cecilia Rangwanasha is Liù. The simplicity of her acting proves perfect for the role while her floated high notes take on symbolic importance, illustrating the thread of gleaming purity that will always resist Turandot’s tormenting threats.

@Alastair Macaulay 2025