“Turandot” in Semi-Staged Splendor at Costa Mesa

Turandot in the Segerstrom Concert Hall.

REVIEW

Pacific Symphony Orchestra, Renée and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall, Costa Mesa

DAVID J BROWN

Giacomo Puccini (1858-1924) in the last
year of his life, while writing Turandot.

In previous years we've somehow managed to miss the Pacific Symphony’s annual opera performance, semi-staged in the Renée and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall, under the baton of its former Artistic and Music Director and current Music Director Laureate, Carl St. Clair. Last season’s production of Das Rheingold was a particularly regretted omission, and if this year’s presentation of Puccini’s final masterpiece, Turandot, of which three performances were given between April 16 and April 21, was any guide, then we’ve certainly been missing something.

It was a ravishing spectacle, both for the ears and the eyes, in which Puccini’s larger-than-life characters—caparisoned vividly but ambiguously as to era and locale (no chinoiserie here!)—strode, emoted, and interacted beneath the Segerstrom’s video screen on which the pages of a hand-drawn shadow book turned, and amidst lofty silken banners swirling and wafting across the full breadth of the Segerstrom stage.

All this was bathed in designer Ken Smith’s lighting effects—sepulchral, kaleidoscopically varied, or radiant according to the unfolding drama—which not only enveloped the width of the performing area but extended to its full height as well, highlighting the fronts of the upper chorus balconies in deep hues and adding extra luster to the burnished acoustic canopy far above.

Altogether the production design was an object-lesson in how to make the most of constrained and easily moveable resources, and this YouTube video, hosted by the stage director Eric Einhorn and also including valuable contributions from costume and puppet designers Caitlin Cisek and Robin Walsh respectively, as well as the lighting designer Ken Smith, gives invaluable insight into the team's approach within their various specialties, predicated on the basic concept of treating Turandot as a fairy-tale drawn from a child’s picture-book.

The performance indeed literally opened out from this, with the distinctly ominous figure of the Mandarin (David Crawford, bass-baritone, making the sonorous best of his brief appearances), rising spectrally (above) from the pages turned by their boy reader (Jayden Guarneri in a non-singing role created specially for this production) against the five massive down-thrusting fff brass chords that open the opera.

Errin Duane Brooks as Calaf.

Turandot has a quite small cast of solo parts, and there was not a single weak link amongst them. By far the largest role is that of Calaf, the initially anonymous prince who finally conquers the “ice princess” Turandot, and the American tenor Errin Duane Brooks—apparently quite a late substitute given that his biographical notes were included as an insert sheet with the already printed program— equally conquered the heroically strenuous demands Puccini makes of his male principal.

When it came to that aria near the start of Act Three, Brooks’ voice initially sounded a little threadbare, but while not (of course!) erasing memories of Pavarotti in his golden prime on the classic Decca recording, he recovered and hit the climactic “Vincerò!” with a force and focus that fully earned the inevitable ovation.

Turandot herself is just a silent presence in Act One, and as in this production she appeared (highly effectively) as a drawn image (below) gazing down from the shadow-book on the screen above, Marjorie Owens’ commanding stage presence was not seen until her entry in Act Two, where she thoroughly proved her mettle at “in questa reggia,” both alone in the first part of the aria and then as an entirely equal partner with Brooks in its later stages.

Marjorie Owens as Turandot, in costume
designed by Caitlin Cisek.

The tragic duo of the exiled Tartar king Timur and his slave companion Liù were sung by Raymond Aceto (bass) and Alisa Jordheim (soprano). Aceto's tall, robust frame made him a rather implausible embodiment of aged frailty, but Ms. Jordheim’s slight figure exactly suited her role. However, there was nothing wanting vocally or dramatically from either, and both really came into their own in Act Three, first with Liù’s desperate and doomed refusal to divulge the secret of Calaf’s name, and then Timur’s agonized lament over her body, which Mr. Aceto made the most moving episode in the whole performance.

The three ministers Ping, Pang, and Pong—the nearest Turandot gets to comic relief—were the well-matched Hunter Enoch (bass-baritone), Nicholas Nestorak (tenor), and David Blalock (tenor), each equipped with an outsize velvet top hat sometimes carried on a stick (why?) and otherwise donned and doffed with frequency. For this listener they brought to mind the Mad Hatter in Alice in Wonderland (and then by association, the Queen of Hearts’ “Off with his head!”—a perhaps not inappropriate parallel in this context).

Liù (Alisa Jorfheim) and
Timur (Raymond Aceto).

The other late substitute in the cast was Nicholas Preston (tenor) in the brief role of Emperor Altoum. His appearance was, I thought, was one of the clear mis-steps in the production, represented as he was by one of the wafting silk banners with the singer nowhere in sight. I wonder how many audience members unfamiliar with the opera failed to figure out why on earth Calaf and Turandot were singing at a banner in the second scene of Act Two?

Carried out though it was with formidable inventiveness and often spectacular results, and with some neat touches (the boy running out to whisper the answer to Turandot’s third riddle reminded me of Bastian in The Neverending Story—a parallel confirmed by Producer Eric Einhorn in the video noted above), I did find something basically misconceived in the interpretation of Turandot as picture-book/fairytale. For me, Puccini’s score is simply too powerful and overwhelming to be thus pigeon-holed and tidied away, and often I felt the music’s oppressive, fist-shaking grandeur to be battering against the constraints of the production concept.

l-r: Pang (Nicholas Nestorak), Pong (David Blalock),
 and Ping (Hunter Enoch).

There’s also the point that it’s a story embodying the designedly pitiless extremes of an exotic, alien imagined culture that Puccini used all the expressive power of his signal genius to project as forcibly as possible, its ethos and his attitude to which have been subject to reams of analysis. In this production all that was pretty much side-stepped, the key example being Liù's torture, which amounted here to having her arm briefly twisted by Pong. Without wanting a Tarantinoesque bloodbath on stage, to be true to the composer—however repulsive and alienating that may be—Liù must be seen to really suffer to the point where she chooses suicide as the only way out of her torment.

Franco Alfano.

Musically, however, there were no reservations whatever. From the doom-laden opening to the apotheotic recap of the “Nessun dorma” theme with which composer-substitute Franco Alfano (1875-1954) crowned Puccini’s mighty but incomplete edifice, the Pacific Symphony and Pacific Chorale respectively played and sang their hearts out. The latter had clearly been meticulously prepared by Artistic Director Robert Istad, underlining that Turandot has some of the most glorious and impactful choral writing in the entire operatic repertoire.

While it would have been interesting to hear one of the many completions essayed by composers other than Alfano, it was good to have his in its entirety, rather than cut as often happens. As for Maestro St. Clair, his mastery of the score was total: expansive to the full where appropriate, always mindful and supportive of the singers, encouraging the extra brass (balcony, stage right) or the Southern California Children’s Chorus (balcony, stage left), leaning into the many dramatic moments, and everywhere drawing the utmost expressive power from the largest forces that Puccini ever used. It was a performance to cherish, greeted by a prolonged and deserved standing ovation, with repeated recalls of the cast and conductor to the stage. 

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Pacific Symphony Orchestra, Segerstrom Center for the Arts, Costa Mesa, Thursday, April 16, 2026, 8 p.m.

Images: The performance: Doug Gifford; Puccini and Alfano: Archivio Storico Ricordi.

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