"We have the date marked on the calendar for six or seven years. We have been planning for a long time to commemorate this centenary," reveals Jordi Gastó, stage director who will bring Turandot to the Palau de la Música this weekend with the Franz Schubert Filharmonia. And it's no coincidence: the musical director and founder of the orchestra, Tomàs Grau, was captivated by the opera when he was a child, and bringing it to the stage coinciding with its centenary was something that had to happen.
Grau will wield the baton that will lead the Palau to imperial Beijing of Turandot, this Saturday and also on Monday, in a year in which not only the 100th anniversary of the opera's premiere is commemorated, but also the orchestra's 20th anniversary. To return to Puccini's universal work, the orchestra will feature the voices of top-tier singers, such as Armenian soprano Lianna Haroutounian as Princess Turandot, tenor Xavier Moreno as Calaf, soprano Carolina López Moreno as Liù, and bass David Cervera as Timur.
On stage, the singers will not be alone. There will be 81 musicians, in addition to 71 singers from the children's choir, and another 80 from the Orfeó Català. In total, more than 240 people to transport back a century, when Turandot premiered on Sunday, April 25, 1926. The La Scala theater in Milan had dressed up to see the posthumous opera by Puccini, who died two years earlier, for the first time. Attendees in Milan were captivated by the work, although they could not see its ending: Puccini died without finishing it. At that premiere, Arturo Toscanini conducted the orchestra up to the point where Puccini left off before dying. For subsequent performances, the finished work could already be seen: Franco Alfano completed the missing pages to close the story.
One hundred years later, the complete work can be seen, in a very different way from how it premiered. The set design by Gastó also differs from the original. Turandot will be experienced in the Palau by getting down to the essential, in a semi-staged format, putting the music in the foreground, and on a practically bare stage where elements that the characters will carry with them will take root. "We have sought the essence of the drama through words, music, and the physical relationship between the singers," summarizes Gastó.
With this "pure and unadorned" staging, the performance will seek to bring only the essential to the Palau. To do this, the set design plays with black and white to represent the two worlds of Puccini's opera: that of the people and Calaf, and that of power and Turandot. During the work, the main characters travel from one world to the other. And it is that, as Grau defends, "Turandot speaks of mystery, of fear, of love and of light, but above all it speaks of transformation," in multiple senses.
In fact, as Gastó himself explains in the program notes, Calaf and Turandot are two extremes of the drama: "He builds a character for himself to survive; she sheds hers to be free. Their paths are opposite, but inevitably convergent. When they meet, they are no longer who they were at the beginning." All with the slave Liù as a mirror and as "the spark of an irreversible change," which remains valid a hundred years later.
The Franz Schubert Filharmonia and the Palau are not alone in this commemoration of the centenary of Turandot. Many great opera houses will revisit Puccini's classic this weekend around the world. But the tribute from Barcelona has a particularity: "We have not found any other symphony orchestra without an opera house that does it, like the Franz Schubert Filharmonia."
To bring the story to the modernist stage of the Palau, with its emblematic characters and its universal Nessun Dorma, more than 240 musicians are preparing for Saturday's premiere, with the general rehearsal scheduled for Sant Jordi afternoon. All to pay homage to one of the most iconic operas in music history, which remains just as alive a century later.