Word: turandote
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...Turandot, like many operatic showpieces, is only worth doing when extraordinarily agile and durable voices can be found to cope with the music's demands. RCA has found such voices. Birgit Nilsson is just about perfect in the title role; perhaps her Turandot even surpasses her thrilling Isolde. Her complete mastery of the extremely high tessitura and lengthy phrases is joined to a subtle depiction of Turandot's change from imperiousness to docility...
...cruel princess must her three Sphinx-like rid win her hand. If they fail, awaits them. So far, twenty have died. Prince Calef, serts his exiled father Timur Turandot's questions, is in answering them. How princess still refuses him. roposes that if she find out before dawn she can dis him as she sees fit. Liu, the vant of Timur who has re faithful to him, claims that knows Calaf's name and suicide rather than reveal before her death, Liu tells Turandot that she has died for Calaf because she loves him. Turandot, moved by Liu's simple...
There are three fairly distinct types of characters and music in the work: the super-heroes, Calaf and Turandot, who sing extremely high, barbarically exciting melodies; the pathetic educators, Liu and Timur, who are alloted simple, quite moving themes reminiscent of earlier Puccini; the commentators, the chorus and Turandot's amusing Chancellor, Ping, Pang and Pong, whose music abruptly shifts from lyric to comic to barbaric. Calaf and Turandot are conceived as opposing extremes. Calaf, the epitome of virility, is adventurous, aggressive, passionate and egocentric. The princess, frigidity personified, is similarly egocentric, but she is fearful of change, defensive...
Some of those who adore the early, sentiment-laden Puccini operas, have decided that Turandot is an "insincere" work. The super-heros are accused of inhuman conduct--which was precisely what Puccini had intended. (In one of his many letters to Giuseppe Adami, the librettist, Puccini had called Calaf and Turandot "almost super-human beings.") However, their inhuman conduct was to become humanized through Liu's example. Calaf's cruel desertion of Liu and Timur and Turandot's vicious behavior towards her subjects and suitors alike was not condoned by Puccini. During the final duet (the part he never completed...
...fault if I consider seeing Turandot preferable to listening to their recording. The album does honor to Turandot. But Puccini's brazen, vivid score sounds best in the opera house--regardless of what high fidelity experts may claim. Furthermore, in a great opera like this, much of the music's power comes from its relation to the mise on scene...