Turandot - Puccini
The Eastern European opera trail that's been leading productions to Ireland via Ellen Kent's Opera International is busy again with first appearances in Cork and Limerick by Latvian National Opera.
These productions travel with multiple casts and conductors. Judging by both the billings (where the singers named were Warren Mok, Ludmila Magomedova and Olga Condina) and the supplied biographies, the line-up heard on the opening night of Puccini's Turandot in Cork on Sunday was not the top one available from the currently touring ensemble.
Never mind. The cast boasted a sensitively fragile Liu in Inga Kalna, whose finespun lines were clearly appreciated by the Opera House audience, a robust Calaf in Aleksei Repchinsky, whose stage movements were firmly of the what-I'm-here-to-do-issing mould, and a heftily frosty Turandot in Irena Milkevic iute, whose haughty aloofness remained more convincing than her melting transformation under the power of Calaf's kiss.
The Ping, Pang and Pong (Eduards Cudakovs, Guntars Rungis and Miervaldis Jencs) were a vocally well-balanced trio that somehow remained dramatically anaemic. Like most of the singers in smaller roles, they sang comfortably within their dynamic reach, and sounded all the better for it.
The production (directors Janis Zarins and Guntis Gailitis, designer Edgars Var daunis) was in that old-fashioned opera style which is not completely removed from 1950s B-movie science fiction. It did, however, look rather cramped on the Opera House stage, and it was hard to imagine that the severe constraints on movement (including sideways entrances on to the central staircase) could have been part of the original conception.
The orchestral playing was of a higher standard than that offered by those other regular visitors from the East, the Moldovan National Opera, though Tadeusz Woichehow ski's conducting was often more rough and ready than refined.
Latvian National Opera's Turandot can be seen at the University Concert Hall in Limerick tonight and tomorrow night. To book, telephone: 061-331549.
