Turandot - Schedule, Program & Tickets

Text Giuseppe Adami & Renato Simoni after Carlo Gozzi
Opera in three acts


Cast

Musical direction
Axel Kober

Staging
Claus Guth

Stage
Etienne Pluss

Costumes
Ursula Kudrna

Choreography
Sommer Ulrickson

Light
Olaf Freese

Video
rocafilm

Dramaturgy
Konrad Kuhn

Turandot, Chinese princess
Asmik Grigorian

Altoum, Emperor of China
Jörg Schneider

Timur, dethroned king of the Tartars
Dan Paul Dumitrescu

Kalaf, his son
Fabio Sartori

Liù, a young slave
Kristina Mkhitaryan

Mandarin
Attila Mokus

Ping, Chancellor
Martin Häßler

Pang, Marshal
Norbert Ernst

Pong, master chef
Hiroshi Amako


Contents

Turandot asks three riddles. Three ministers warn of the death that awaits those who fail at the riddles. And three artists attempted to finish Giacomo Puccini's unfinished work in the spirit of the late composer.

When Calàf, the dethroned Mongolian prince who fled to Beijing, falls in love with Princess Turandot, he puts himself in mortal danger: because only those who solve the three riddles of the princess can become her bridegroom. Anyone who fails will be executed – like all previous applicants. Calàf's father Timur and Liù, whom Calàf loves without his knowledge, summon him in vain.
He accepts the challenge. In the score of the great music storyteller Puccini, the individual and society confront each other in a highly irritating way. The relentless system that Turandot has built around him bears traits of ceremony and grotesque, of total organization and controlled mass hysteria: a world that spans between the impenetrable, deadly attraction of Turandot and seemingly uninterrupted rituals of courtship, warning, testing and murder . Shadows and priests populate them. Loudly exaggerated ministers speak their warnings in a tone that also musically oscillates between provocation and mockery - you take their word for it that they are preparing weddings and funerals at the same time. The basis of all this - the score as well as the state - is the crowd, which alternately cries for blood and begs for mercy for the condemned. An unpredictable, uncanny magnitude.



Subject to change.