This recording was made during a series of eight performances in the vast courtyard in front of the building formerly known as the Palace of Supreme Harmony (the booklet calls it the Palace of Heavenly Purity) in the Forbidden or Imperial City of Beijing. A note in the booklet says that the courtyard seats 32,000, but oddly enough no photographs are provided of the area or of how the production (basically that of the Teatro Comunale in Florence) was expanded to fit it. The statement that 1,500 extra costumes were made suggests the scale of the enterprise; the assertion that they were ‘as true to the Ming dynasty as possible’ implies a bizarre approach to ‘authenticity’: the opera takes place not in the Ming period but, as the score says, ‘in the time of fables’, and the stage directions make it quite clear that Puccini and his librettists were not thinking of a setting even faintly resembling the Palace of Supreme Harmony.
The recording, still more oddly, sometimes suggests impressive space but no less often denies it. The trumpets to announce the Emperor Altoum’s arrival come from a great distance, but the Emperor himself, immediately afterwards, is down by the footlights, not at the summit of a vast flight of stairs. Turandot’s waiting women, silencing the hubbub in Act 1, are very believably ‘on the balcony of the loggia’, as the libretto says, and the phantoms of those that Turandot has slain do indeed rise from ‘the darkness beneath the ramparts’. But all the principals seem to inhabit a rather small and shallow stage; even Turandot, who is supposed to descend the staircase from the Emperor’s throne during the riddle scene, is face-to-face with Calaf from the start. That orchestral detail is for the most part clear in this strange acoustic is commendable, but the brass is at times disappointingly backward, and the solo voices are rather edged, with a halo of reverberance. The overall effect is of listening to a decently amplified outdoor performance from a seat too close to the stage.
The worst victim of this awkward recording is Casolla’s Turandot. In a big auditorium her power and her fearless top notes would be striking, but in close-up one is more aware of her wide vibrato and her lack of involvement with the text. Frittoli’s Liu is more impressive (not ideally pure, but firmly sung and touching) and Larin’s Calaf much more so. He is in admirable voice, the one member of the cast who is consistently ready to sing quietly, and gives an account of the role that few present-day tenors could rival for sheer vocalism or sensitivity. The rest of the cast is at least adequate, save for a Ping who is more often off the note than on it, and Mehta gives a decent if at times hurried account of the score (he persuades Larin to enter and I suspect to break the ‘Nessun dorma’ speed record). A passable performance, in short, and for those who saw the Beijing production an agreeable souvenir, but no real competition for Callas/Fernandi/ Schwarzkopf/Serafin (on EMI) or Sutherland/ Pavarotti/Caballe/Mehta (on Decca).'