Search - Armando Ariostini, José A. Garciá-Quijada, Thomson Smillie :: An Introduction to Puccini's Turandot

A Fine Narration Let Down by the Provincial Musical Examples

J Scott Morrison | Middlebury VT, USA | 12/21/2004

(3 out of 5 stars)

"This is another in the excellent 'Opera Explained' series from Naxos, all of them written by Thomson Smillie and narrated with verve by David Timson. Already the series contains CDs devoted to 21 other operas, including such favorites as Aïda, La Bohème and Carmen, and all of them are excellent.



This one, however, is let down by the musical examples, taken from Naxos's own recording of 'Turandot' that features second-level singers. The provincial orchestra (Málaga) and conductor (Alexander Rahbari) do OK, but they cannot make up for the only barely acceptable contributions by singers soprano Giovanna Casolla as Turandot and tenor Lando Bardolini as Calaf. As Liù, soprano Masako Deguci is better but still pretty generic. And when the three principals of this opera are not up to international standards, it makes it hard to get involved in the music. Still, Smillie's text is helpful in explaining the background and the goings-on of this work, the only fairy-tale opera ever written by Puccini. Although he didn't live to finish it, he left copious notes about the final scene and Smillie makes a good case for accepting Franco Alfano's completion of the score; I agree with that assessment.



The bottom line is that the spoken narration here is fine, but you'd do better to supplement it with the complete music of 'Turandot' by buying one of the classic recordings featuring Pavarotti/Sutherland or Bjoerling/Nilsson, both at mid-price.



Scott Morrison"