What’s the point of conducting an opera if you can’t hear the singers? There should be a balance between the voices and the music. The rest of the cast’s voices disappeared completely. Only singers with big voices and strong projection (like Anna Pirozzi, Michael Fabiano, or Miren Urbieta-Vega) carried over the orchestra, although they even sounded distant at times. And this happened throughout the whole performance. Well, that final sustained chord of the chorus could not be heard as the orchestra was playing with Luisotti’s idea of how a fortississimo should sound. He plays the orchestra extremely loud, and therefore most singers were covered by the dense orchestration, but also, even the chorus could not be heard at all in moments, such as at the end of their first long intervention in “Turandot! Ah!” where the whole chorus is singing fortissimo, and the soprano section is holding a high C sharp (which is a high ringing note). Nicola Luisotti came back to the podium after having conducted the 2018 run of performances. The action turns out to be slow, tedious, and boring, and you can’t follow the plot at all. I reaffirm myself: Wilson’s theatrical language does not sustain a two-hour opera.

To make matters worse, it was very noticeable that the singers were not comfortable with the demands of the staging at all, as they have to stay on the stage for a long time and always sing facing the front, with no facial expression, no reactions, no movements…. So, there was nothing new: strong and beautiful photographic moments, but a static staging where the characters don’t interact with each other, walk like Egyptians in false profiles, and have all the movements strictly choreographed in an abstract code that only Wilson understands. The production was revival intact (only the costumes of Ping, Pang, and Pong have been changed), and OperaWire already reviewed this production in 2018 when it opened. The opera will be screened live in several squares all over Spain, will be shown on RTVE (The main Spanish Tv channel), and will be live streamed ( with a 90-minute delay) and later be available on the Teatro Real’s platform: Myoperaplayer.

Teatro Real closes the 2022-23 season with 17 performances of Puccini’s “ Turandot.” It is a revival of their own Robert Wilson production, which premiered at Teatro Real in 2018, featuring three different casts.

B flat power chord