Turandot on ice, now with more breakdancing!
Those slackers among you who were not in attendance for Sunday’s chat/viewing of the Bayerische Staatsoper Turandot now have the chance to get up to speed with this wild, weird and wacky Fura dels Baus production, after the jump.
Well, the fucking video was removed. Did anyone download it?
One has to be very quick with such things. Best advice is simply download it without watching it in realtime. Then decide later if you want to keep it or not. The Russian still have it:
http://narod.ru/disk/64037810001.1c91102bb0d8a01e138d0ce739d19e40/Turandot_LIVE.flv.html
Thank you thank you thank you. Hopefully it will be uploaded again. In the meantime this will do.
Fura dels Baus do some fun things -- the Grande Macabre we saw in Rome with singers being expelled from the mouth, nipples, crotch and anus of a gigantic revolving woman was perhaps a not unworthy expression of Ligeti’s opera -- even some of the rather bizarre Bollywood-meets-Lord of the Rings-meets-Leonardo Da Vinci-meets Kiki and her Dolphins from the Lido de Paris Tannhauser at Scala was of interested. But and you just knew there was a but didn’t you? the actual stage direction was often of the old line-up, face the conductor, arms and lungs wide open school of opera acting. Motivation -- bah what motivation look at the slick projections and the floating bodies! Oh look there’s more floating bodies!!!
Funny but a little stale after two productions -- what must it be like after four or five?
Nuria Espert directed a Turandot ending in suicide
I always though that this was the way to end the opera, long before Nuria came with the idea. It is absurd (for me)that such a bitch ends blissfully in love and living happy without remorse.
?a href=”http://www.tudou.com/programs/view/lh3Db6lUd6Q”>Turandot, as seen from Beijing.
Take two:
Turandot, Beijing-Style
An unusually girlish Turandot from the National Opera of Korea, Hye-Youn Seo. The tenor is Dongwon Shin.
The ENO Rupert Goold Turandot set in and around a Chinese restaurant, complete with dancing Elvis and drug f#$%ed Liu from 2009 remains my fave for the time being.
Pig pig pig pig pig pig!
Quite a different Turandot and rare to find on video:
Any notice that in this production, Liu doesn’t get to off herself….instead she is basically executed by getting a bamboo pole rammed up her ass and out through the top of her head…….