Some opera-lovers prefer concert performances to full stagings. I don’t. It’s that whole Gesamtkunstwerk thing: opera needs to be seen as well as heard. There’ll always be circumstances in which concert performances are welcome — to rescue a neglected score, say, or if a symphony orchestra wants to stretch itself. But when a major company presents standard repertoire in concert, it feels like an admission of defeat. Opera North recently mounted a magnificent concert version of Wagner’s Ring — but for all the brave talk about a ‘radically stripped-back’ production, who seriously doubts that, if funds had allowed, it’d rather have gone the whole way?
Now it’s doing Turandot in concert. Let’s consider this an end-of-season bonus rather than a response to financial pressure, because Opera North could certainly use the benefit of the doubt: its music director Aleksandar Markovic quit last month without public explanation. His replacement for Turandot was Sir Richard Armstrong, and personally I’d call that an upgrade. In Leeds Town Hall — whose architectural extravagance gives Zeffirelli a run for his money —the orchestra and chorus sounded ebullient, pumping out gorgeous colours at colossal volume without the coarseness that tended to disfigure Markovic’s performances.
In fact, if you wanted a purely musical case for opera in concert, you’d struggle to find a stronger one. Armstrong combined surging momentum with long-breathed phrases, over which Orla Boylan’s Turandot and Rafael Rojas’s Calaf soared with fiery intensity. Alastair Miles’s rich-voiced Timur, Sunyoung Seo’s Liu — sung with a tenderness through which steel just occasionally glinted — and the way the three courtiers Ping, Pong and Pang made their exchanges dance, would all have made for a knockout recording. Annabel Arden directed, and as is often the way with concert stagings there were some powerful moments: Liu’s defiant eye contact with Turandot, a haggard Calaf turning ‘Nessun Dorma’ into a veiled threat, and the defeated Princess falling poleaxed to the floor.
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