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Andrei Serban's production of Puccini's Turandot, The Royal Opera (Photo: Tristram Kenton)

None shall sleep! Princess Turandot has proclaimed. And who could, with Andrei Serban’s production (which has racked up well over 40 years and 100 performances since its 1984 premiere) throwing everything and the kitchen wok at its audience. Golden thrones descend on golden clouds; acrobats tumble; red silk streamers cascade; masked choruses process; giant death-masks snarl and gush ribbon-blood. No spectacle is left languishing in the director’s theatrical chest. You’d have to be a psychopathic ice-princess not to be delighted. 

And yet.  

The time this show was on stage in 2023 (when rumours of its imminent demise were, it now seems, greatly exaggerated) was under Antonio Pappano’s baton – an at-last, first-time outing for the veteran conductor, fresh from his electric studio recording. The impact was total, galvanising, thrilling. This time, with Venezuela’s Rafael Payare at the helm, things don’t quite coalesce. 

Turandot is an opera painted in primary colours, but Payare’s expressive direction gave us cloudy pastels, smudged throughout Act I by ensemble issues. The Chorus, often recessed in Sally Jacobs’ tiered set, were muted and at odds with a pit delivering intermittently exciting warmth and clarity. Brass matched the Emperor for gilded splendour in the Act I and II finales, and the two harps sitting on top of the texture to the side of the pit set the orchestral surface rippling. Special mention too of Act III’s scene-setting night-time soundscape (accompanying Serban’s lantern-lit on-stage fantasy) with its churning string-darkness and glints of tuned percussion. But the overall effect was unsteady, and nothing unsettles quite like a wavering up-stroke to an axe-blow.  

Aled Hall as Pang, Michael Gibson as Pong, SeokJong Baek as Calaf and Hansung Yoo as Ping in Andrei Serban's production of Puccini's Turandot, The Royal Opera (Photo: Tristram Kenton)

Puccini’s musical fable throws up psychological problems largely solved by Serban’s parade of tableaux, by masks that transform a cast into what they are: puppets who provoke emotion rather than live it. But if flesh-and-blood is off the table, then the voices need to serve all three courses. The big draw for this cast is Sondra Radvanovsky’s Turandot. Already bladed on the Pappano recording (made before she had debuted the role on stage), the soprano’s big, dangerous voice now reveals some newly serrated edges. Her 'In questa reggia' is grittily challenging, but alive with trauma, setting us up for a final act where the princess’s sudden change of heart seems less born of love than surrender to a new kind of compulsion and control.  

Anna Princeva is an 'Act III Liù' – her 'Signore ascolta' grainy, over-mature, upper register failing to fly – and while the extra vocal weight comes into its own in the torture scene, we miss the lighter tonal foil to Radvanovsky. She gets little to play off in Adam Palka’s under-projected Timur (Jack Furness is back as director for this revival, but we miss many of the telling details he previously drew out). There’s some beautiful singing from Hansung Yoo’s Ping, and Ossian Huskinson makes his mark as the Mandarin.  

But the evening belongs – once again – to Seokjong Baek’s Calaf, the South-Korean baritone-turned-tenor who just gets better and better. It’s a voice full of juice and zing, a performance eager on the front of the beat in a production where so much sits just behind. None shall sleep; certainly not with Baek on wake-up duty. 

Turandot is at the Royal Opera until 19 April

rbo.org.uk