Chief among these is Andrei Serban’s 40-year-old staging of Puccini’s Turandot.
When a show has been running as long as this, we tend to take it for granted, as though the only question – in any revival – is how good the soloists are.
But the way this one is put together explains that longevity.
Andrei Serban’s staging of the story of a cold-hearted princess and her would be suitor is visually stunning. (Image: Tristram Kenton) Choreographer Kate Flatt, who was working on the equally long-running Les Miserables at the same time as this, and whose whirling dancers set the visual tone throughout, took her inspiration from t’ai chi and the ritual gestures of karate.
The work is set in the mythic past in Peking’s Imperial Palace and this grounding in ancient forms is one reason why the show doesn’t feel dated.
The siting of the huge chorus round the back of the stage, as though inside a giant drum, allows their sound to come at us with massive force, blending with the orchestra at its loudest.
The costumes in raw silk are as varied as they would have been on the streets of imperial China. The doomed Prince of Persia, who failed to answer the three riddles to win the cold-hearted princess Turandot is a hauntingly vulnerable and other-worldly creation.
Some of the players on the gongs and giant tam-tam have been with the show since its inception. Everything reinforces the realism of this perennially gripping melodrama.
Meanwhile Anna Princeva, as the slave-girl Liu, steals the show in both her big arias with a gloriously sweet sound. There are no weak links in the rest of this vocal chain, anchored by Ossian Huskinson’s Mandarin, Adam Palka’s plangent Timur, and Paul Hopwood’s commanding Emperor Altoum.
And with Rafael Payare in the pit, all the musical qualities we need come through in spades: the tender cruelty of the score answers to the savage beauty of Sally Jacobs’s designs.
Turandot runs at The Royal Opera House Covent Garden until 19 April.
