Overview
- Director Andrea Breth frames the tale as a tightly run terror state, using a stark black‑and‑white design with iron cages, masked ritual and ministers styled as cold technocrats.
- Lucia Ronchetti’s prologue, Io tacerò, surrounds the audience with voices before the music launches into Puccini, and the performance closes where Puccini stopped, over Liù’s mourning rather than a later completion.
- General Music Director Thomas Guggeis leads a lean, sharp reading that heightens the opera’s nightmarish ritual, with critics hearing precision over bombast.
- Guanqun Yu’s restrained Liù drew strong praise, while Alfred Kim’s bright‑edged Calaf and Elza van den Heever’s masked, icy Turandot kept the focus on power over romance.
- Protesters outside the house highlighted Kim’s 2017 assault conviction in Toulouse, which brought a suspended eight‑month sentence and a fine, though the show continued and the audience applauded.