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Solen Mainguené as Liù in Turandot | Photo: Jonas Persson

The cherry blossom was a giveaway. So were the children: wide eyed, bright voiced, on hand from the start to suggest a better future. Sofia Jupither’s staging of Turandot does away with blood and guts, focusing instead on a tangible sense of hope and a community clinging to it with every fibre it has. The effect, with some of the most exquisitely calibrated and dramatically nuanced Puccini conducting you will hear in Scandinavia, is strangely captivating and uncommonly moving. 

If Turandot is undergoing a reappraisal right now thanks to Antonio Pappano, this production - first seen at the Finnish National Opera last year and imbued with a striking freshness of vision despite its traditional looks - throws its own ideas into the ring. They screw you up, your ancestors, and Turandot bears that burden from her first appearance, even as Jupither underlines her frightening power by having both princess and entourage travel at a different theatrical speed to everyone else.

All is glowing beauty on Erlend Birkeland’s terraced set - a vision of the past/future optimistically longed for by everyone from the Emperor down. Everyone except Turandot, whose pained isolation is all too clear. Nobody’s really into the executions; Ping, Pang and Pong are not so much a commedia dell’arte troupe deployed for light relief as mirrors for all our souls. When Turandot sings ‘hope is deceptive’ in the first of her riddles, the masses flinch. No one believes it but her.

Turandot’s big dramatic problem - the title character’s sudden transformation from ice queen to human loveburst - is well mitigated by Jupither’s preparing of the narrative ground. The princess sheds layers of costume as the acts pass, a steady emotional disarming. She is visibly jolted into the parallel universe of love, empathy and feeling by Liù’s suicide - aided by an particularly sensitive portrayal of her father, whose every appearance seems to galvanize his citizens into believing yes, this can happen.

Anne Derouard as Turandot with the cast of Turandot at Malmö Opera | Credit: Jonas Persson

Just as distinctive, and uninterested in gesture its own sake, is Daniel Carter’s conducting. In nine years of covering productions at Malmö Opera, I have never heard the company deliver this level of musical sophistication. The orchestra sounds silken, luminous, burnished and also faultless - never overblown but always yearning, something different from Pappano’s sense of ceremony but aligned with his ability to calm or enliven a phrase, to temper the musical heartbeat. The extended chorus sounds just as articulate and supple, tracked by the slow twisting of knobs in the lighting booth (Ellen Ruge did the designs).

Only the solo singing can’t quite keep up. Anne Derouard has sufficient power in her voice for the title role but needs a touch more control. If she sounds razory and unsubtle at the top, that allows her to warm up and quieten down in her ultimate thawing (in the uncut Alfano ending). Daniel Johansson brings nobility to Calaf, his baritenor burnished and elegant but without the last degree of firepower. ‘Nessun Dorma’ is more noble than spectacular, but perhaps that’s this Calaf’s whole thing - a bloke less eager to prove his manhood, more convinced he can stop the killing with wit.

Ping, Pang and Pong are tightly sung by Jonah Spungin, Per Lindström and Conny Thimander - the latter given extra acting jobs in resonant support of Jupither’s concept. Mariano Buccino has a lovely voice for Timur, as full of humanity as Stefan Dahlberg’s Emperor. Solen Mainguené is a striking Liù, with a more mature and dramatic voice than the role suggests but one invested with extreme articulation and feeling. The capacity audience went wild for her. The rest of the run is sold-out too - at the very least a boost, though perhaps even a re-set, for a company that has recently looked in danger of losing its way.

Turandot is at Malmö Opera until 21 April | www.malmoopera.se