Sony G90 manual Preoccupation like that made more sense, but, More than I would have expected

dot’s looks. Maybe, on a deeper level, he senses

her own need to shed her obsession, but all we

hear from him is that she’s beautiful. Maybe in

the 1920s, when Puccini composed the piece, a

preoccupation like that made more sense, but

now it sounds silly. “Jeez, Cal! I know you like bimbos, but

stay away from this one!” Still, this is all we have to go on, and

when the singer in the title role is dowdy, without even the

star-power that can override mere looks, Turandot as drama

falls apart.

What did grip me, though, was the production. I would

have said, up to now, that there’s nothing really Chinese about

Turandot. And why would there be? Yes, Puccini conscien-

tiously used Chinese folk songs in his score, but what did he

really know about China? What did any Westerner, besides a

few scholars and unusually open-minded travelers, really

know? China, in this opera, serves (or so I used to think)

merely as an exotic locale for a pre-Hollywood spectacular,

much as Egypt serves in Verdi’s Aïda, or, reaching heights of

grand absurdity, the American frontier, complete with Indi-

ans, did in an earlier Puccini work, La fanciulla del west

(“The Girl of the Golden West”).

But now I’m not so sure. This production, first of all, is

grand enough to suit the opera, whose music – a direct ances-

tor, I’d think, of Hollywood scores for epic films – proclaims

its size, and gilded (if not precisely golden) glitter. Conductor

Zubin Mehta even jokes, in the “making of,” that the opera

tucks into a tiny corner of the staging. Hordes of Chinese

extras come on stage, along with dancers, and the Western

singers in the leading roles are costumed with unheard-of

sumptuousness. Even Liú, who has crossed deserts and

begged for coins in the street, is wearing clothes lavish

enough to bankrupt a small city; her nails flash with mani-

cured splendor. Somehow, instead of making the work seem

silly, all this helps it make sense. “It’s only a fable,” the pro-

duction seems to tell us, with surprising gentleness, consider-

ing its size. Some of the Chinese effects are brilliant, even

touching. In the first scene, there’s a chorus about the rising

moon; onstage we see a corps of Chinese dancers, wearing

long white sculpted robes that shiver in the midnight wind.

Touches like these even give the opera depth it wouldn’t nor-

mally have, perhaps because the visual imagery takes the

grand suggestions in the music to a higher and more truthful

plane. Whether Puccini’s vision was surprisingly Chinese, or

whether Zhang Yimou picked Chinese imagery that would

complement the music, I don’t know. (And don’t look to the

“making of” for him to tell us; nothing there goes even half an

inch below the surface.) But the whole thing adds up to much

more than I would have expected.

And in the third act, even the operatic performance starts

to be good. I’m not quite sure what makes that happen. Zubin

Mehta gets some credit. He’s a conductor somewhat reviled

these days by critics, ever since his hollow tenure in the Eight-

ies with the New York Philharmonic. But there’s no way to

fault him here. His Turandot (he conducts the Maggio Musi-

cale Fiorentino orchestra from Italy) is spacious, lyrical, and

suitably grand. And Barbara Frittoli helps to bring the act to

life. She’s the one principal, remember, who can really sing

her part, and here, given her biggest scene (her sacrifice), she

loses all her caution, and wakes the drama up.

But Sergeij Larin gets a medal, too, for his “Nessun

dorma.” He doesn’t interact much, I’ve said, but here he does

not have to; the aria is sung alone on stage, for what seems to

be his favorite dramatic partner, himself. And his voice rings

out. I have to admit that I’m suspicious of that ringing sound,

because the entire sound of the performance is artificial. It

had to be; the event took place outdoors, in a huge open

space. Obviously, the singers are miked, and the “making of”

shows us exactly how, as well as revealing, for those who

catch a fleeting moment when Larin tests a mike, that his

singing is beefed up with some reverb. “Beefing up” might not

be the intention; the idea might simply be to give the sound

some ambience. But there’s nothing like reverb to make a

rough voice a little smoother, and a small voice a little bigger.

Larin doesn’t have the trumpet sound a Calaf really needs;

worse, when we hear him in a practice studio in the “making

of,” he’s rougher than he sounds in the performance. Give him

the benefit of every doubt; grant that he’s just rehearsing, that

he could have been hoarse, or just generally having a bad day.

But still I think that amplification helped him. Maybe, know-

ing it was there, he sang more lightly than he would have, not

pushing his voice, but letting it blossom naturally. If then he’s

not loud enough, there’s a simple solution: Turn up the vol-

ume, which would have been simplicity itself to do. In the

“making of,” we see a giant mixing console, with separate

channels, clearly marked, for every singer.

And yet in the end, I was moved (even though Puccini died

before finishing the opera, and someone else had to write the

final scene, someone who couldn’t find the right, convincing

sound for Turandot’s crucial transformation). And so, I find I

recommend this DVD – though if you’ve never heard the opera,

you might supplement it with either of two classic audio-only

recordings, the RCA with Jussi Björling as Calaf, or the EMI

with Franco Corelli; both have Birgit Nilsson, spectacularly the

right kind of voice, as Turandot. (Avoid the set with Pavarotti

and Joan Sutherland, spectacularly the wrong sort of voices.

Pavarotti sings “Nessun dorma” nicely, but he’s far too light and

lyrical for this heroic role; don’t be fooled.)

About the goodies: I’ve already said the “making of” won’t

tell you anything deep; I trust you’re not surprised. The syn-

opsis, read out loud against snapshots from the performance,

is pompous in English, much more friendly in the other lan-

guages; it’s adequate, and not a word too long. There’s a PCM

audio-only track, again with snapshots, if you want that. What

the package badly needs, but doesn’t have, is a complete

libretto of the opera, on screen or in a booklet, so listeners

can prep themselves and then watch without subtitles. The

whole package needed much more careful editing. I’ve men-

tioned the two spellings of the tenor’s name, but there are

odd, no doubt accidental omissions. We’re correctly told, for

instance, that Zhang Yimou is a distinguished film director,

but we don’t learn the names of any of his films.

The box contains a booklet, with the kind of random

scholarly essay on the opera’s origins that might be found

with any new recording. We didn’t need that; we needed what

I said was missing from the “making of,” some comment from

Zhang or from a Chinese scholar on how Chinese the opera

seems, how it feels to be a Chinese person working with it.

The musical performance, with its strengths and obvious

weaknesses, is what it is. But if someone had worked one-

fourth as carefully on the DVD package as Zhang (and his

choreographer and costumer) worked on the staging, this first

big-time classical DVD – welcome as it is in many ways –

could have been better.