Turandot on Sydney Harbour.

Puccini’s Turandot on Sydney Harbour. 

This production of Turandot is about as spectacular as a promised spectacle could possibly be, performed on huge stage built out onto Sydney Harbour with the famous Sydney Opera House is the background. Having sat through this opera on my own I had to marvel at the wonderful set with the huge pagoda but found myself wondering why such a building apparently housing just one princess, a thoroughly nasty, evil yet beautiful piece of work, would have such a marvellous modern hydraulic system when the story (utter tosh that it is) is set in ancient china. The humongous fire breathing dragon did not float my boat and my guess is that I have a week’s detention as punishment coming for saying so. With a story line like this the audience must give themselves purely to the art of the display because it is hard to see why, if the Emperor was trying to trade his beautiful daughter Turandot played by the aptly named Dragana Radakovic, off to anybody of Royal blood, why HE, being to all powerful head honcho in those parts, would allow this slip of a thing to demand that any possible suitor must agree to being set three riddles and if they get it wrong…. Oh whoops there goes another head! Was the seed for the Mikado born here I ask because, a young slave girl wanders in with an old, blind, decrepit master and they just bump into a wandering Prince Calaf sung by Riccardo Massi who happens to be the old guys long lost son. Yes, that old chestnut. 

So by the interval I had decided not to try and make any sense of it but just to drink in the set the amazing costumes, wigs, huge cast and glorious voices. It was about as grand as grand opera gets but my head may be the next to roll because I still think that there is actually just the one show stopper aria, Nessun Dorma. There, I said it. 

The value of this tremendous presentation must make me sound a poor little peasant woman but I was glad that I had paid the senior citizen price of £13 in the Windmill Cinema in Littlehampton rather than been stripped of a couple of hundred at the opera house, though I must add that everybody should go to huge opera house at least once in a lifetime. Being myself a pretty much lifelong theatre goer following the blessings of ballet, opera and the dramatic arts. All in all I loved it, lapped it up, every moment, almost drowning in the sheer pleasure of the evening. Apparently, Turandot was banned for many years in China. As the director said in the short interval film of the making of the set that all myth is probably based loosely on something true.