Turandot review – musically, the most interesting work ever written by Puccini

Covent Garden was crowded tonight with spectators eager to witness the first performance in this country of Puccini’s posthumous opera. The occasion was one of such exceptional festivity and importance that it would be rash to judge from the first flush of success that this work will ever equal Bohème and Tosca in popularity, or compare favourably with its slightly nearer relation, Madam Butterfly.

One must disregard this evening’s favourable reception and try to judge only from the prognostications offered by the work itself. The task is no easy one, for the opera has merits which are likely to be interpreted as its chief defects; that is to say, Puccini offers us, in this last effort of his, music that is both better than and different from what the public has come to expect of him – an admirable and a fatal thing for a popular composer to do.

Musically, Turandot is decidedly the most interesting work ever written by Puccini. It is a marked advance both in quality and in scope upon anything done by him previously. The texture of his score has a richness of instrumental and harmonic colour, a depth of orchestral and choral writing such as he never attained previously, and the music shows much alert awareness of the technical resources acquired by other creative musicians during the last few years of his life. The adroitness with which he turned polytonality, for instance, to his advantage at

Article source: http://www.theguardian.com/music/from-the-archive-blog/2015/dec/15/puccini-turandot-covent-garden-1927-review