The Singapore Lyric Opera Chorus was horrible in Turandot (not singing in unison, early entries etc). Even a Secondary School Choir can sing better.

The Philharmonic Orchestra was somewhat better, but even then they weren't playing together all the time.

Yet, they dared to have not two, not three but FOUR curtain calls.


"‘In the opera the most difficult part is making [the princess] Turandot believable. You have to make use of all the other characters to do so. For example, Calaf has seen her only once and is immediately entranced, to the extent that he gambles with his life for her. So on stage, you have to balance the believability of this so-called icy beauty and the reality of the singer who happens to be on the stage.’ He relates with a chuckle: ‘I once had a production with a 300- pound soprano who sang superbly well, but it was very difficult to make her look believable, so I had to stage her very far away from the audience, in very special lighting.’"

--- the Staging Guy


"All the participants agreed that Alfano's solution to the problem of making Calaf's kiss sufficiently momentous is an utter failure, and a distasteful one - it sounds rather like Fafner's killing of Fasolt: a piled-up chord is followed by heavy bass-drum thwacks and then silence, and the miracle of melting the Princess's heart of ice has apparently been accomplished. Roger Parker rightly pointed out that this music is more suitable for a rape than a conversion, though it was precisely the act of making convincing Turandot's change of heart, or acquisition of one, that caused Puccini's block...

Even the restrained Julian Budden, in his excellent new book on Puccini, writes that `Nothing in the text of the final duet suggests that Calaf's love for Turandot amounts to anything more than a physical obsession: nor can the ingenuities of Simoni and Adami's text for "Del primo pianto" convince us that the Princess's submission is any less hormonal'"

--- Hollow swan-song


In other news, I still like only one opera.

Drama, pathos and emo just don't appeal to me.