It’s hard not to be slightly alarmed by the number of executions taking place at Leeds Town Hall. In 2005, Opera North staged Handel’s grand oratorio Saul here, which presented the grisly spectacle of Goliath’s head bleeding through a linen bag. A year later, Strauss’s Salome served the head of John the Baptist on a silver platter. Now the company has made the hall the venue for Puccini’s final, grandiose creation, whose merciless title character is besotted with beheadings.
Opera North’s concert performances at Leeds Town Hall began as a virtue born of necessity, while the company’s home at the Grand theatre underwent redevelopment. The temporary move unlocked a new artistic direction, enabling the company to tackle larger works culminating in the innovative, highly acclaimed Ring cycle, which replaced conventional staging with cinematic visuals and put the orchestra centre-stage. As successful as it was, you could argue that Opera North’s Ring was fundamentally a large-scale digital animation with live musical accompaniment. Turandot is far closer to a full staging, however, with stylised but effective direction from Annabel Arden and sets and costumes by Joanna Parker. The symbolism is fairly spare – a giant throne towers above the orchestra and topples when Calaf successfully answers Princess Turandot’s three riddles, thus destroying her power. But more than this, the production seems to provide an answer for the greater riddle of how to stage Turandot at all.
Puccini’s death in 1924, before the opera was entirely finished, bequeathed producers with a problem. It was left as a rather unstable mix of bel canto showpieces and exotic chinoiserie, allied to some of Puccini’s most experimental harmonies and a reductionist representation of Old Peking that comes embarrassingly close to pantomime.
Rather than grasping for plausibility, Arden’s approach suggests that Turandot works best when presented as a grand oratorio; not least due to the emphasis placed on the magnificent Opera North chorus, arrayed like a bank of bloodthirsty Handelian philistines who cheer on the executions and atrocities with harrowing intensity.
It’s not uncommon for the servant girl Liu to supplant the title character in the audience’s affections, given the more forgiving nature of the role. Sunyoung Seo’s Liu is everything you want from the character: limpid, liquid-toned and self-sacrificial. But this is a more even contest, in which Orla Boylan’s imperiously sung Turandot is less a cold-blooded harpie than a woman who seems genuinely disoriented by the speed at which she finds herself thawing out. It is left to Rafael Rojas’s Calaf to win her with his irresistibly burnished voice, and an impeccably tasteful delivery of Nessun dorma that demands room for a fourth tenor on the podium. There’s something of the Lord High Executioner about Sir Richard Armstrong’s cut-and-thrust conducting style, which places the orchestra right at the heart of the drama. The manic agitation of the Chinese percussionist, in a thicket of tuned gongs high above the platform, is pure theatre in its own right.
•At Town Hall, Leeds, on 12 and 14 May. Box ofice: 0844-848 2720. On tour until 20 May.
