TURANDOT • PALAU DES ARTS VALENCIA
★★★★★☆
Photo: Miguel Lorenzo-Mikel Ponze
REVIEW TURANDOT: PUCCINI REBOOTED IN VALENCIA
Puccini meets Wagner in this exceptionally powerful production of Turandot at Valencia’s unique opera house, staged in a sombre, almost Hunger Games-like universe, largely stripped of its classic oriental fairy-tale trappings in Àlex Ollé’s striking production.
Instead, rising in the background is a monumental, matte-black structure – a sort of Escher-inspired staircase labyrinth, a graphic dream of five-storey power architecture, where the movement and control of the masses are built into the very fabric of the space. Here, a handful of armoured police officers clad in chainmail and wielding maces keep the people in check with brutal beatings and imperious gestures.
Photo: Miguel Lorenzo-Mikel Ponze
The people are not participants, but silent witnesses to the excesses of ‘the system’. The Catalan director Àlex Ollé, with a background in the distinctive theatre company La Fura dels Baus, consistently approaches opera as total theatre.
Photo: Miguel Lorenzo-Mikel Ponze
The chorus does not merely serve as a backdrop, but as a single, unified organism caught up in the set design’s concept. In this interpretation, Turandot is not primarily about love or riddles, but about power, fear and oppression.
Every time one experiences Turandot, it is striking just how overwhelming the choir’s role is, and here it is given a powerful impact that makes one’s hair stand on end. Musically, the performance is dazzling under Sir Mark Elder, who maintains a tight, energetic grip on Puccini’s grandiose score.
In the title role is Ekaterina Semenchuk, whose dark, dramatic tone makes Turandot something more than just a cool, iconic figure, though it does not quite create the human crack in the façade that one might miss.
Photo: Miguel Lorenzo-Mikel Ponze
Gregory Kunde as Calaf is experienced and assured, but his ‘Nessun dorma’ lacks that X-factor – that moment when time stands still – and becomes a slight anticlimax in an otherwise energy-packed evening.
The performance is largely carried by Carolina López Moreno as Liù, who delivers the evening’s most moving performance. Her voice possesses both warmth and fragility, and her stage presence shatters the cold, mechanical atmosphere around her. Liù is not merely a supporting character, but the true centre of the work. Her ultimate sacrifice – choosing suicide rather than revealing Calaf’s true identity – takes on a weight that the traditional ending can scarcely bear.
That is why Ollé chooses to go all the way: after the final kiss, in which Calaf has at last won the princess, Turandot takes Liù’s knife and slits her own throat. No one gets Turandot!
A final image that dissolves any remnant of romantic redemption.
Calaf’s victory becomes hollow, almost meaningless, and love appears not as liberation, but as coercion.
At the same time, the two female characters are linked: whilst Liù dies for love, Turandot dies because she cannot live up to it. The ruler of power and the powerless slave meet on equal ground.
Photo: Miguel Lorenzo-Mikel Ponze
The staging is effective and consistent – and never mind that the visual concept may, in the long run, feel a little monotonous despite the grand tableaux. The radical final twist reopens the work. Not as a fairy tale, but as a dark reflection on power, violence and the price of love. A bold reboot of Puccini’s final work.
Five stars for an original, highly entertaining production, complemented by a choir and orchestra that deliver with overwhelming power and make the evening a musical triumph.
