On May 13 Turandot opera in the format of «opera quest» in three acts will be performed on the stage of NOVAT. Dmitry Jurowski will stand at the conductor’s podium. The musical director and principal conductor of the Theatre has told us about this mysterious opera.
NOVAT: Turandot is no ordinary opera but a legendary one if we can put it this way...
Dmitry Jurowski: Turandot is not just one of pieces by Puccini, it was his final masterpiece. But he did not have time to finish it. It is symbolic in a way: a peculiar requiem for fading away Liu became the composer’s requiem for himself. In 1926, when the opera was being performed for the first time, conductor Arturo Toscanini, a friend of Puccini, put his baton aside after the scene of Liu’s death, turned to the audience and said: «It is exactly the part when great Puccini passed away, I don’t find it possible to continue the performance.» It was quite a dramatic emotional gesture, but for me the opera still ends on this particular part in some way.
N.: However, there is a finale composed by Franco Alfano.
D.J.: Indeed, piety to Puccini is strong, but Alfano, surely, also deserves admiration. If it was up to me, I would recompose the finale, but I am not a composer and I cannot even imagine how it should sound. It always hurts when a great composer passes away, but here it is a unique kind of pain. In Turandot Puccini went behind absolutely unknown horizons and into a new dimension of orchestra sound. There are colors in the opera that we even cannot re-create simply because we do not have such musical instruments. Perhaps somewhere in China they are still being used — some purely surprising percussion, but we, unfortunately, cannot find them.
N.: Would you agree that Puccini’s musical canvas has a very distinctive emotional pallet?
D.J.: The sound flow of the score is profoundly unique. Surely, there is a lot of romanticism, typical for Puccini, but sometimes it becomes scary indeed: a true Asian horror film twisted in its cruelty. One can feel it in the music, for sometimes it gives you the creeps. There are only three or four moments when your heart swells with tenderness: all of the scenes with Liu, the first revelation of Turandot, when it becomes clear that she is, in fact, a very unhappy human being, and the first aria of Calaf. This is such an amount of love, tenderness and sorrow! Apart from that, the opera embodies a lot of coldness, cruelty and realism in its music and plot.
N.: Asia, in general, is a mysterious place...
D.J.: Yes, and if Turandot should be performed somewhere, then it is here in NOVAT while corresponding to its grandiose scale. I really do hope that the audience will enjoy this production so much, that it will be kept in the repertoire for many years to come.
N.: We keep on experimenting with genres in order to find a key to our audience’s hearts. Since January we started hosting night time opera reality quests. Among them is a game full of riddles and mysteries based on Turandot opera.
D.J.: Our goal is not to please, but to interest the audience, to have people not being left indifferent, but to help them escape the routine. Then visiting theatres starts making sense! I would like the theatre to reveal the true self of a person and not to turn into a social must. That is why I am glad that we can approach this subject from different perspectives and through such events as well.