Puccini’s epic opera about the beautiful but cold-hearted Chinese princess Turandot who plays violent head games (literally) with potential suitors begins in Penang this weekend. Sponsored entirely by Texchem as part of their 30th anniversary celebrations, it has been steadily exceeding the initial budget of RM600,000. It has reportedly touched the RM1 million mark without, the KL coordinator admiringly enthuses, a single complain from group president Fumihiko Konishi.
An opera buff and lover of classical music, Konishi has committed to staging a full scale opera every year “as a way of giving back something to the community for cultural goodwill.” Apart from selecting Turandot, he has otherwise left all artistic management in the hands of Pamela Ong of the Penang Arts Council and even mobilised his corporate personnel to assist to the coordinating team wherever necessary. Last year, then Prime Minister Mahathir attended a performance of Madame Butterfly at the Sunway Resort ballroom on his birthday. This year, the epic will be staged at the 1,400 seater lstana Budaya.
Affable and very English conductor Jeremy Silver has been in town for a month of rehearsals. He talks about conducting Turandot:
Opera is a huge collaborative effort. If I do a concert with a symphony orchestra, they book me, I turn up, I do 4 or 5 rehearsals, I do the concert, I walk out and that’s the end of that.
Opera is much bigger: its music, its drama and its design. The roles of Turandot and Calaf require very big and experienced voices. You’re unlikely to find an opera troupe that would ever cast this from the inside – every company I know of would book guests.
The main artistic project management team would be me, as conductor; Loh Siew Tuan, the casting director; Alain Wullschleger, the stage director; Hannah Becher, the set designer; and Pamela Ong, who oversees everything and coordinates us.
The National Symphony Orchestra, which comes with the lstana Budaya, has a core of about 35 players. For this production, we’ve got 65. I don’t get to pick and choose the guests and extras. It’s up to the NSO to keep their standards high and pick the right people. I think they made fantastic choices.
I have a lot more to do with choosing the principal singers. I suggested two singers from England for the main roles, and they sang for Siew Tuan so that she could confirm that she liked them too. It was very much a communal effort.
Getting the right team together is a very big part of a conductor’s work because ultimately operas are written by composers and the musical demands are paramount, so we need to make sure we find the singers with the right musical and vocal qualities to suit the particular roles.
The voices required are huge! A Turandot voice is not the same as a Mimi voice in La Boheme – it’s even considered more strenuous than, say, Tosca, which is also big singing. The piece also has a certain mystique about it because Puccini died before he finished it. It was his last project and it was a very special project for him; he is reported to have said that he burnt everything he wrote beforehand just for this piece. It consumed him for the last 2 years of his life.
It was subsequently finished by one of his pupils, a chap called Franco Alfano. The great Italian conductor Arturo Toscanini was supposed to conduct the first performance and he didn’t want this guy Alfano to finish it, so when Toscanini got hold of the finished score, there were a lot of things he didn’t like and he made huge cuts in it. His cut version is the version that’s been done almost without exception since the 1920s.
Recently, other composers have attempted new endings based on all the musical sketches Puccini left behind. At one of the early performances, the conductor put down his baton at the point where Puccini stopped and said, “Ladies and gentlemen, that’s where Puccini laid down his pen”, and they all went home. A bit dramatic perhaps… We’re doing the Alfano ending with the Toscanini cuts.
For a first performance in Malaysia, doing it in a proper theatre is a great luxury. The lstana Budaya is a fantastic building; I absolutely love it. It’s beautiful, the auditorium itself is incredibly well equipped, it has masses of space at the back to rehearse, and a huge stage. In terms of facilities of course, modern buildings are like that: the newly refurbished Convent Garden has these things, but the older operas down the road, proper theatres mind you, don’t have a hydraulic pit. The MPO is also in an incredible building. You’ve got everything here that a big city should have.
Puccini’s operas were getting bigger as he grew older – this one requires a huge orchestra and lots of what we in the west would call ‘exotic instruments’ that colour the score in a fabulous way. A typical Verdi opera will have an orchestra of about half the size. Turandot also requires a huge chorus; we have 50, and that is probably the smallest we can work with, and it works very well, but one can easily have up to 70 to 80 and it would be fabulous.
While it’s huge, the musical language of Turandot is actually very sparse. Composers tend to concentrate their stuff as they mature – it becomes sparser, more essential – they get rid of all the superfluous details. Puccini has done that. His early operas were lavish – a young mans’ music, you know; the outpouring of expression. This is extraordinarily concentrated.
Yet the music is very accessible. It’s absolutely gorgeous, sensuous music and everybody responds to it. The story is very appealing as well. Also, this is a very special event because it’s a company that does one big opera a year. That’s fine, they put the finance in…. we need that because opera doesn’t make money: it always costs!
It’s expensive because it’s a mix of all the different arts. Opera is a wonderful mix of theatre, which is very earthy, and music, which shows you a whole world behind the everyday meaning.
This is my first project in Asia and I sense an extraordinary enthusiasm for something which is not everyday, which is a little new. Choruses and orchestras in established companies can be, how shall I put it… rather unionised. They watch the clock and all that, and it becomes a little bit like a job, unfortunately. They need inspiration the whole time and it’s the conductor’s job, I guess, to keep them inspired.
What does a conductor do? A conductor’s job is to integrate everybody into one intention. A conductor persuades everybody how the thing is going to be expressed and, in this case, integrating some 120 people.
An opera rehearsal period begins with the musical work. That is, singers and a pianist, with the pianist playing the orchestra part. As soon as we’ve got the musical things slightly fixed, then we do staging rehearsals, when the whole thing is integrated with the chorus. The orchestra comes in much later once the whole staging has been sorted out. Typically, there are about six sessions with the orchestra… I’ve done nine sessions with them.
We’re building it up in layers and unifying our ideas. On Saturday, they will play for the first time with the singers, without staging. They’ve got six hours to get used to each other. Then after that we have four rehearsals – that’s 13 or 14 hours-with staging, with orchestra, with everybody… to put the whole thing together properly. We then have a full dress rehearsal – the final run – and then the performance.
Turandot is a piece that has been on my wish list for a long time. Siew Tuan lives in London and she contacted me. It was all very out of the blue; I never expected to come to Malaysia but I’m very thankful it happened.
First Published: 15.12.2003 on Kakiseni