Giacomo Puccini (1858–1924)
Turandot (1926)
La principessa Turandot – Birgit Nilsson (soprano)
II principe ignoto (Calaf) – Jussi Björling (tenor)
Liu – Renata Tebaldi (soprano)
Orchestra e Coro del Teatro dell’opera di Roma/Erich Leinsdorf
rec. 3-11 July 1959, Teatro dell’Opera di Roma, Italy
Libretto & score available online as download
Reviewed as 24-bit FLAC download
Stereo XR Remastering
Pristine Audio PACO 218 [2 CDs: 115]

Following on from its first appearance in a deliberately incomplete performance in 1926, it took some considerable time for Turandot to take its place alongside Boheme, Tosca and Butterfly in the indispensable Puccini operatic canon. Indeed its central role in the repertoire was not really established until a trio of recordings in the period 1961-72 issued by the three major players in Italian opera at that time: one each from RCA (conducted by Erich Leinsdorf), EMI (conducted by Francesco Molinari-Pradelli) and Decca (with Zubin Mehta). There had been a couple of earlier LP sets, neither really satisfactory. An EMI set under Tullio Serafin suffered from inadequate mono sound and some eccentric casting (Elisabeth Schwarzkopf in a role she never undertook on stage) and an even earlier Decca recording with Inge Borkh and Mario del Monaco, whilst certainly bold and loud (and in stereo), lacked any of the degree of subtlety and repose which also are an essential element in the score. The appearance of this recording in 1961 transformed the situation.

In the first place the set enshrined one of the great assumptions of the title role in the shape of the Swedish soprano Birgit Nilsson. Over a period of two decades she made herself into the central exponent of Turandot both in the studio and on the stage (I saw her myself in the days of my youth at Covent Garden, and she really was stupendous). Her command of the imperious nature of the ice princess was unparalleled by any rival before or indeed since, and she was also able – albeit with some evident and conscious effort – to fine down her tone to give a convincing performance of the final pages when she relents into the arms of her ardent lover. Her many live performances enshrined on pirate and broadcast-relay recordings give testimony to the absolute reliability of both her technique and her interpretation; and here in studio sessions in 1959 she was at the peak of her form, about to make her Metropolitan Opera debut and step onto the international stage which she was to dominate for the next decade and more. “If Isolde made me famous,” she once observed, “it was Turandot that made me rich.” And rightly so.

Her female counterpart here, Renata Tebaldi as Liù, recorded her role twice (she had already undertaken it for the earlier Decca set), but unlike Nilsson she never sang the slave girl on stage. She also was a highly reliable artist, but her dramatic assumptions in her performances were never very strongly characterised, and Liù here is placid rather than engaged. She also displays some very occasional but surprising musical defects; her tuning in Signore, ascolta! tends suspiciously towards flatness at a couple of points, and her floating of her final phrase in the same aria (not enhanced by some hammy sobbing) totally lacks the innocence and purity so amply supplied by Montserrat Caballé in the later Decca recording under Mehta.

The artist featured on the cover of this set is Jussi Björling as Calaf, one of his last commercial recordings in a career chequered with alcoholism and illness. His star billing is well justified; he has also the plasticity of phrasing and honeyed tones that make his appearances in other Puccini sets such as the Beecham Bohème so enchanting, but at the same time he does not lack the degree of sheer power that is required for the big moments such as the end of Act One – where, we are informed, he recorded the whole of Non piangere, Liu in a single take. Only his decision to take the lower option (avoiding the top C) at the end of Act Two is at all disappointing; the higher alternative is obviously more hazardous in stage performance, but it is really dramatically and musically desirable and necessary to trump the two top Cs delivered by the stentorian Nilsson and choral sopranos a couple of bars earlier. It could surely have been managed in the studio. Luciano Pavarotti and Franco Corelli on the rival sets make no bones about it; and it is the latter who rises most convincingly to the heroics of the role, even when his honeyed legato passages can sometimes seem over-emphatic.

The role of Calaf’s father Timur is a substantial one (he is on stage for much of the opera, including the whole of Act One) but he has really very little to sing – nothing at all in Act Two – until his outburst of rage and grief after the death of Liù. In these circumstances Giorgio Tozzi is fully the equal of his rivals on disc, although Nicolai Ghiaurov invests his lament with all the ferocity and nobility of an outraged Boris Godunov. Attempts are sometimes made by singers to convey the blindness and old age of the character through the voice, but these are inevitably doomed to failure. Where Puccini does ask for a sense of fragility is in the role of the Emperor Altoum, Turandot’s father, where he specifically states that the voice of the singer should sound aged and decrepit, to the extent of deliberately scaling down his orchestration to allow for this to be dramatically realised. Record companies over the years have capitalised on this by glitzily casting the role with star veterans from wildly disparate fields – Sir Peter Pears for Mehta, Nicolai Gedda for the Chandos recording in English, and even the definitely young and healthy Michael Spyres in the recent Pappano set – but here the casting of Alessio de Paolis is frankly inadequate, not only feeble but teetering practically on the verge of inaudibility. He and Björling between them render the end of Act Two particularly lacking in any sense of grandeur.

The three masks are generally well cast in recordings – they are gifts to any group of comprimario singers – but here Mario Sereni (incorrectly identified as a tenor in the cast listing, and cited as such in my colleague Ralph Moore’s earlier review) tends to lack the needed sense of focus that is demanded by the little trio Ho una casa nell’Honan in the opening part of Act Two, which Leinsdorf in any case takes too fast to allow for the relaxation required in this veritable scherzo of a scene. But at least he avoids the disfiguring and unnecessary niggling cuts that Molinari-Pradelli makes in the EMI recording, even though the best rendition of this delightful interlude comes with Mehta. Piero de Palma, incidentally, appears in all three of these sets, and quite rightly too; he was a standard fixture in many Italian opera recordings from 1950 onwards and one of the most reliable of character tenors in the repertoire. In the other roles, it should surely have been possible to get Leonardo Monreale’s Mandarin to deliver his rhythms in the important opening bars with more biting precision than here.

I have mentioned Leinsdorf’s conducting briefly, and many critics over the years have complained about the stiffness of his beat in Puccini and elsewhere. I have to say that I certainly found no lack of expressive engagement here, and he follows Björling’s engagingly wayward rubato in his arias with exemplary understanding. He certainly gets the best out of the often-outrageous scoring with its plethora of oriental effects, well-captured by the microphones, with a vividness that at times recalls Orff or Stravinsky (both still in the future at the time of composition). Some years later Molinari-Pradelli and EMI managed to capture a richer Puccinian ambience, but this very richness of acoustic served to conceal some of the more extraordinary elements in the score and the famous Chinese gongs for example tended to recede behind the strings. Mehta and Decca perhaps achieved the best balance between exoticism and romanticism, and their recorded sound remains superlative even over half a century later. The brass playing from the Rome orchestra can sometimes be vulgar and over-loud (not necessarily Leinsdorf’s fault, they produced similar tone for other conductors such as Solti) in a way that their London counterparts for Mehta avoid.

Indeed, for those who are willing to accept Joan Sutherland’s Turandot (one of her most dramatic performances on disc, even if she never sang the role on stage) the Mehta set will surely remain the most satisfactory rendition of Turandot on record. His is also the most satisfactory musical text for Act Two (no cuts in the masks scene, the ending properly ecstatic), and it is only let down by the use of the standard abridged Alfano conclusion to Act Three. I cannot be the only listener who has become increasingly frustrated over the years by this hybrid completion carved out by Toscanini from Alfano’s original; and better acquaintance with the music of Alfano himself has served to illustrate the superiority of his imagination in his initial handling of Puccini’s fragmentary sketches for the final duet. For that reason, if none other, the recent Pappano recording for EMI should not only establish a new parameter for studio recordings but for stagings also; it is high time to restore the original version as the norm.

For those who find Sutherland too much of an exotic fruit, Nilsson’s pair of recordings will surely provide an ideal alternative; either with her usual stage sparring-partner Corelli in plushly romantic sound, or this set with the more delicately nuanced Björling in an orchestral context which emphasises the strangeness of the many modern and exotic elements in Puccini’s score. The remastering by Andrew Rose is as excellent as one would expect from this source, and the original stereo is enhanced by a subtle degree of acoustic manipulation which gives a thoroughly realistic opera-house effect. The presentation of the discs themselves is good, and of course Pristine as usual make scores available online for purchasers.

Paul Corfield Godfrey

Previous reviews: Ralph Moore (October 2024) ~ Jim Westhead (November 2024)

Other cast
Ping – Mario Sereni (baritone)
Pang – Piero De Palma (tenor)
Pong – Tommaso Frascati (tenor)
Timur – Giorgio Tozzi (bass)
L’imperatore Altoum – Alessio De Paolis (tenor)
Un mandarino – Leonardo Monreale (bass)
II principino di Persia – Adelio Zaganara (tenor)