In 'Turandot,' Hearing Is Believing, Once Again

Washington Post Feb 24, 2001. By Philip Kennicott

Once upon a time -- if you'll indulge in some dangerous nostalgia -- opera was all about the soprano. After an evening in the theater, you might have had some vague impression of a leather-lunged tenor, a glowering baritone or two and perhaps happy thoughts about the mishaps of the mezzo. But when the curtain came down and all the artifice was dispelled by a blast of night air, it was the effect of the soprano that lingered. The Washington Opera's revival of its 1993 "Turandot," which opened Saturday for a sold-out run at the Kennedy Center Opera House, is a refreshingly modest bit of stagecraft distinguished by extraordinarily fine singing. Two artists -- Alessandra Marc, who is returning to the company for what amounts to a major debut in the title role, and Ana Maria Martinez, who sings the role of Liu -- carry a production that seems almost old-fashioned in its emphasis on vocal rather than scenic pleasures. "Turandot" is a warhorse and, like anything repeated too often and with too little reconsideration, it has become warped in the popular imagination. It is the opera that gave us "Nessun dorma," Pavarotti's favorite stadium piffle; its tale of desire and icy resistance set in ancient China inspires fits of scenic excess. It is also Puccini's most daringly modernist score, a study in the degeneracy of the Italian operatic tradition -- the increasing violence and caricature of its stock characters and plots -- after World War I. When sung by two voices as powerful and starkly different as those of Marc and Martinez, it functions as an allegory of the voice and lyric stage, a work that says, Here are the extremes that opera has produced, and asks which of them will be the future. Puccini's last opera has two substantial roles for soprano -- for the prima donna, a sexually frustrated princess who was slaughtering the prime of Asian manhood, and the piccola donna, the good slave girl who embodies the traditional virtues of loyalty and modesty amid the royal carnage. The former, Turandot, makes the sternest vocal demands in Puccini's roster of sopranos; the latter, Liu, is an essentially lyric role that demands a clear line, light texture and pure intonation. Great Turandots, such as Birgit Nilsson, have also sung Elektra and Brunnhilde; great Lius -- have there been any great Lius? -- have been happier looking back to the lighter Italian tradition of Mimi and Violetta. Puccini, writing his opera in the post-Wagnerian age of Richard Strauss, puts past and present onstage simultaneously. He heightens the contrast by focusing all of the dramatic interest -- but none of the audience sympathy -- on the big-voiced Turandot, while reserving his affection for the rather pallid and inert Liu. Marc and Martinez perfectly embodied this contrast. Martinez's first-act "Signore, ascolta" was sung with small, round tones, a focused, tight vibrato and a well-supported top pianissimo; it was tender and imploring, and appropriately empty. Liu, after all, makes her entrance saying, "I'm nothing, pay me no mind." She can influence the action only as a shadow of the past, a shade of all the pretty-voiced but passive heroines of the previous century. Marc, in the second act, seized the stage with "In questa reggia" and kept the dramatic tension unyielding to the end of the act. The voice has a thrilling top, all but the very highest notes richly and darkly colored, with a powerful sense of the spoken voice behind them. The lower chest voice is equally compelling, with only some weaker tones in the middle to lower third of the instrument. Though she doesn't move quickly onstage, Marc's dramatic powers have increased substantially in the past decade; with arms and veils and icy facial expressions, she is an imposingly imperious Turandot. Her singing draws one into Puccini's orchestra, into a world of pure sound in which dramatic realism becomes irrelevant and Turandot exists as a sonic idea rather than a flesh-and-blood character (or soprano). The music of Liu is tidy and invites applause; the music of Turandot, when sung with this force, elides the barrier between self and sound, listener and music. Surrounding this mayhem is a production that is almost thoroughly sensible. Zack Brown's costumes are contentedly in the Orientalist kitsch tradition. His sets, which force the action perhaps a bit too much to the lip of the stage, are architecturally efficient -- platforms and steps are laid out symmetrically, with Joan Sullivan-Genthe's lighting providing most of the atmosphere. It is a "Turandot" with its feet planted firmly in the opera house, not Hollywood. Director Lotfi Mansouri takes no risks but gets the job done. The second-act Ping, Pang, Pong scene was centered on the music and mostly free of stage antics -- notwithstanding one close-formation traversal of the stage that threatened to break into a chorus line. In the third act, Mansouri might have spared Marc some of the stairs, but she took them gamely and remained in full voice. Strong supporting roles included Rosendo Flores' Timur, costumed like Moses in sackcloth but sung with a compact and nicely supported bass, and baritone Daniel Mobbs's subversive yet sympathetic Ping. Tenor Ian DeNolfo sang the lead role of Calaf with all the notes and plenty of volume. The voice betrayed a good deal of effort behind its production and was rarely lustrous, but the basic lines were there. The chorus and orchestra, under Music Director Heinz Fricke, were as they always are under Fricke: a first-class ensemble. © 2001 The Washington Post Company