KEY POINTS:
Christopher Alden's 1994 production of Turandot, meticulously staged by Roy Rallo, is a spectacular finale for NBR New Zealand Opera's 2007 season.
Alden stressed that Puccini and he were both intent on keeping opera alive, edgy and dangerous; the American's take on this darkest of fairytales does just that.
Alden's chorus is not arrayed in silk, but a swarming bureaucratic mass, dressed for business, in identical black-and-white, the women sporting Louise Brooks bangs.
Paul Steinberg's sets are bold, luridly hued wrap-arounds, housing a portrait gallery of Turandot's victims one minute, providing a balcony for voyeurs the next.
This is Turandot's realm and Margaret Medlyn makes it her domain. It is a triumph for the soprano, from her first casual stroll past the doomed Prince of Persia.
Alden had drawn a picture of a trance-bound heroine, desperately channelling from the past, surrounded by an invisible shield.
Medlyn catches this from the first stratospheric phrases of her In questa reggia but, as the opera progresses and passions warm, her icy demeanour melts.
Dongwon Shin, the Korean tenor who saved Australian Opera's Turandot last year, is a solid Calaf, showing sensitive engagement with other characters, and letting forth a resounding Nessun dorma.
As Liu, the doomed handmaiden at the heart of the opera, Maria Costanza Nocentini repeated the success of her Auckland Gilda three years ago. Her Tu che di gel sei cinta seems to soar to heaven itself.
Ping, Pang and Pong are Phillip Rhodes, Adrian McEniery and Benjamin Fifita Makisi, dressed as if they had stepped out of the Dick Tracy movie. They revel in the theatrical to-and-fro, moving from ensemble typing to a sinister attack on Liu, with Rhodes in outstanding lyrical form as he remembers his Honan home.
Terry Barry's Emperor and Malcolm Ede's Mandarin are convincingly handled while Grant Dickson makes us feel the intense weight of Timur's sorrows in both song and movement.
While the Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra, under Nicholas Braithwaite, respond in kind to the iridescent score, especially when Puccini seems to throw a Ravelian canopy over proceedings, the Chapman Tripp Opera Chorus are not yet quite as confident, distracted, perhaps, by the unusual staging. But in all, an engrossing night of opera and theatre that is just too good to miss.
Review
* What: Turandot
* Where: Aotea Centre
* Reviewer: William Dart
