An old production that’s aged better than most: Royal Opera’s Turandot reviewed

Since its première in 1984, Andrei Serban’s production of Puccini’s Turandot has been revived 15 times at Covent Garden, not counting excursions to Wembley Arena. The current revival has been running (by all accounts, to capacity houses) since 10  March. The compelling reason for reviewing such a well-worn revival mid-run is that this performance featured the Royal Opera debut of the Nottingham-born Wagnerian soprano Catherine Foster – which by any reckoning was well overdue.

Foster is hugely esteemed in the German-speaking world. In itself, that doesn’t prove anything – I mean, they rate Franz Welser-Möst too. ‘Big in Germany’ is often brandished as a rebuke to an imagined Little British artistic parochialism, but I suspect the full story of Foster’s long absence from Covent Garden is more complex and more mundane than that; and probably known only to her agent and the Royal Opera’s casting department. The mandarins of Floral Street are inscrutable: they’ve never booked Anthony Negus or restaged The Ice Break either.