Atlanta Opera | Puccini: Turandot

Folks who forget to mark-up their calendars at the beginning of every year (hand raised) may have been reminded by the Atlanta Opera’s social media algorithm that 2026 marks the 100-year anniversary of the premiere of Puccini’s Turandot. Mingled with similar AI manufactured Turandot hype (Nissan Dorma, anyone), folks may have also seen more sobering reels devoted to the financial crisis befalling the American operatic scene. For the past couple of years, the news cycle has been a bummer for opera audiences in Detroit and Syracuse, and earlier this year a sketchy deal between the Metropolitan Opera and the Saudis went kaput. As the number crunching over at Lincoln Center gets awkward, whispers of cuts, layoffs and even the pawning of the iconic Chagalls add to a general sense of dread looming over the industry. But if you’re in the 404, 770 and (ew) 470 area codes, chances are you have not felt the effects of such economic downturn as a patron of the Atlanta Opera. The company’s post-pandemic lockdown narrative has been, as told by Carl W. Knobloch, Jr. General & Artistic Director Tomer Zvulun, one of steady progress and prosperity. He accompanies these claims with compelling receipts:  1) increased the number of performances per year, 2) significantly expanded repertoire (just ignore next season’s lineup), 3) will close the 2025-26 season with Wagner’s Gotterdamerung, which will put the company’s history making first Ring cycle across the finish line, and 4) begun construction of the Molly Blank Center for Opera. To further validate his victory dance, Mr. Zvulun even cued up video of himself at the groundbreaking, bulldozer and all. It makes this Roswell Road kid, whose opera addiction was nurtured and shaped by the Atlanta Opera from an early age, let out a “Hell yeah! It’s our time!” That is until the details of the company’s production, a reimagining of Puccini’s Turandot well beyond the realm of production value, began to spread on the internet, and including a new ending which attempts to, as Mr. Zvulun’s put it before the sold out Friday May 1^st performance, shine a new light on the ultimate riddle, and to offer the audience a fresh perspective. 

As I fought the post-performance crowd on my way to the parking deck, I knew that I would have to call upon heavy reinforcements to help me digest this new take on Puccini’s Turandot, the merits of the new production, and Atlanta Opera’s unexpected entry into the Turandot alternative ending club which seems to be getting a little bit out of hand as of late.

HWCII: I suppose this is when you decided to call me (and wake me up) at 11 pm with all your babbling.

DV: In my defense, I summoned you because I knew that you had seen the Tuesday, April 28^th show, which means that you and I are uniquely positioned to discuss Turandot at the Atlanta Opera since we both have vivid memories of all the company’s previous productions, which takes us back to…

HWCII: 1994!

DV: My goodness me, yes. Back then we represented the audience opera companies claim to want. Energetic, passionate for the artform, young….

HWCII: YOU were certainly young back then. Weren’t you in High School? 

DV: Sophomore at North Springs (Go Spartans!). My family didn’t have two of nothing back then so I would gather all the money earned working at McDonald’s and buy a nose-bleed seat at the opera, which in those days performed at the Woodruff Arts Center. I was all the hashtags back then. 

HWCII: That was the first of two Turandot productions staged in the Fred Scott era. By the time the second production rolled around in 2000, the company had moved to The Fox Theater. Turandot came back in 2007 after Dennis Hanthorn took over. 

DV: That production also opened the Cobb Energy Center and established the Atlanta Opera as the venue’s main resident company to this day. The last production of Turandot took place under Tomer Zvulun in 2017. So many venues, so many eras. I was tempted to add that Atlanta Olympics Opera Gala in 1996 when Gwyneth Jones and Vladimir Popov scraped the paint off the walls at Symphony Hall in excerpts from Act II, but I guess that doesn’t technically count.

HWCII: We don’t want to scandalize our readers.

DV: Fair enough. But before we start digging too far into the history books, I think we should address the big elephant in the room.

HWCII: Do you mean the “new” ending?

DV: Yes. For those that missed the show, see the diagram below (which I made using my graphic design expertise) to explain what this new ending is all about.

HWCII: I should start by saying that this is the fourth production of the opera I have seen so far this year, so my perspective is filtered by the fact that I know I can see a “standard“ version of this opera anytime, anywhere. I was also influenced by some of the aggressive comments I read on social media bashing this new ending. By the time I made my way to the theatre, I was ready for Act I to start off with Turandot herself singing Nessun Dorma accompanied by a mandolin. But I saw nothing that I could register as sacrilegious, or offensive. That said, I don’t think that removing the bulk of Alfano’s involvement out of the score accomplishes much, and this new version really doesn’t address the unsatisfactory aftertaste one has to deal with after the curtain falls on Turandot. I still don’t understand what triggered Turandot’s emotional transition after “In questa reggia” in this new ending. That whole business with the gun was not convincing enough. Atlanta Opera’s new ending may not be a total disaster, but it doesn’t mean that I want to hear Turandot done this way ever again. 

DV: I had a similar reaction at first, but as I made my way home after the performance, I became increasingly nagged by the whole thing. For starters, I don’t fully understand what this innovation is exactly trying to fix. There is no solution to this riddle save for resurrecting Puccini. La morte è una. I am no Alfano apologist: In my opinion, he was a fine composer, and his Risurrezione and La leggenda di Sakuntala are a good time. But it is true that for decades, what we call the “Alfano II” ending has been a compromise most audiences have had to make peace with. There’s no denying that as soon as the final duet gets started, his orchestral and tonal language is not flattered when juxtaposed by everything that has come before it. 

HWCII: Yes, as soon as Alfano takes over, it’s night and day. The sonic landscape, the color, it’s all very different.

 DV: While I am no Puccini scholar, I am familiar with the published research by William Weaver and have rubbed elbows with people who have spent time investigating the Turandot sketches in the basement of the Archivio Storico Ricordi in Milan. After whatever Toscanini-inspired intrigue ultimately removed Zandonai’s name (Puccini’s pick) from consideration, Alfano’s assignment by Ricordi (his publisher) to complete Turandot out of the sketches and chicken scratch left by Puccini (guarded hawkishly, along with the completed parts, by Toscanini) put Alfano in a most unfortunate position. His original drafts were rejected, and the version that ultimately made its way into performance practice was heavily edited by Toscanini. I find the few performances that have used the complete Alfano I ending to be meatier and more satisfying. When the Atlanta Opera announced that the opening night performance would take place on the exact centennial of the opera’s premiere, it was my original hope that they would either perform the full Alfano I ending or pull a Toscanini and end the opera after Liu’s death. In a round-about way, they’ve opted to do the latter, but this reshuffling of “In questa reggia” to Act III? Hmmmm…I find it lazy at best, and ultimately gets us in trouble – partly for the reasons you described.

HWCII: That lack of a satisfying transition for Turandot. 

DV: Yes, that’s the main, glaring problem that this new ending fails to resolve. In my opinion, the winner of the Atlanta Opera’s 2026 Turandot new ending sweepstakes is Alfano. He at least gave it his all, but he struggles with the same issues that instigated Puccini’s writer’s block when trying to get the opera across the finish line: he has to summon a Mimi/Rodolfo Act I type of magic to transition out of the fantastically savage tone which has loomed over the entire opera up until this point. It all hinges on that damn kiss, which is supposed to be the moment to usher forth the transformation. I always hear in Alfano’s orchestration a sort of desperate attempt to summon some sort of magic spell to convince the audience. It’s awkward and it does not land, but at least we have the text as a general guide to get us home in those last 10 minutes. The new ending introduces a gun pantomime to replace the dramatic context of this scene, and it is completely inadequate. Also, there damage done to Puccini’s masterful dramatic pacing that I simply cannot ignore.

HWCII: You mean the fact that Act III is now overloaded with a string of isolated solos?

DV: That sticks out to me, yes, but there’s a more subtle, insidious damage at play here. No one, with the exception of Richard Strauss, knows how to introduce a prima donna like Puccini. In the case of Turandot, he makes the audience wait half the night to hear what would be considered her aria di sortita. So when “In questa reggia” starts in the middle of Act II, it’s the culmination of all that anticipation. She has a story to tell, so we lean forward to listen to her explanation of how we’ve gotten to the savage reality that’s been hammered into our ear for the past hour – Puccini also has she decency to give the soprano a little time to mellow out her instrument before he puts it through the meat grinder. There’s legitimate cinematic magic happening there in the orchestration and word painting. That bit about the princes arriving to Peking in their caravans, it’s one of those delicious instances where “the ear sees”. This slow unveiling of her motivation makes the subsequent riddle scene so terrifying, so relocating the aria to the end of Act III breaks a lot of that spell for me.  Let’s not talk about the fact that the text references riddles which were already resolved in the previous act.  I will illustrate with another obvious example: The way the music surged at end of Act I after Calaf strikes the gong. You know how it reads “your fate is sealed, dude” in your mind? Imagine if you move that moment to some other act: it would fizzle out.  

HWCII: Fair. So why do you think they did this?  

DV:  I’ve thought hard about this, and I think there are clues in the program which may indicate that the purpose of this innovation aims to “fix” the opera beyond Alfano. There’s a lot of talk about “reimagining the opera for a new audience” and I think the creative team had concerns with the Adami & Simoni text, and that cringy, creepy kiss which conveniently disappears alongside the entire duet that ushers us to the end. I am not sure if this is either the main motivation or a pivot, but I suppose only time will tell how the changing social landscape will affect the presentation of different works.  Maybe Carmen and Don Jose will get married next year? Stay tuned. 

HWCII: I was not expecting that jump scare, but what you mention does square up with the printed apology accompanying the photos from previous productions in the playbill. I think the creative team cleverly skated around those “outdated conventions” in this production. I should mention that my experience of this production was colored by the fact that I brought along a friend who is not an experienced opera goer. He was quite overwhelmed and cried in every act. Because I was making a concerted effort to put myself in his shoes. his reactions helped me experience the performance in a way that I would have not experienced alone. The use of color and the balance between the size of the production, coupled with the movement and the sonic tide between the principals and chorus projected the opera into the auditorium in a way that I felt I was listening to this music for the first time.

DV: I agree.  This felt immersive. I don’t know that previous Turandots have managed to strike that type of golden synergy before. Perhaps the 2017 production by Doucet and Barbe and Arthur Fagen came close. 

HCWII: That was a good show too. A lot of my experience this time around credits the work of Ivan Lopez Reynoso, whom I believe is now our new principal conductor. But this is not his debut.

DV: No, we heard him in Macbeth last season.

HCWII: (Pregnant pause) Then I consider this an upgrade. I felt he managed to get bombastic when the music all but demands it without becoming a barrier to his principals (well, most, but we will address that in a bit). I also felt that he really enjoyed the score and took his time to emphasize the little details that caught his interest to the audience. At several points I would hear sounds which my traumatized ear associates with someone’s cellphone going off, only to realize that he was letting us hear the celeste.

DV: Thinking back to his debut, I remember the cast in Macbeth was so problematic that, even though I considered Reynoso one of the saving graces of that performance, his contribution was clearly affected the unevenness up onstage. I found him less affected by any such casting woes this time around. 

HCWII: Well, I was affected by a couple of them. 

DV: Is this how we bring up Angela Meade’sTurandot?

HCWII: Yes, but not without the proper context. In Atlanta, her predecessors were RoseMarie Freni, Martile Rowland, Lori Phillips and Marcy Stonikas.

DV: I have fond memories of the 1994 production, primarily for vocal reasons. In many ways, the Atlanta Opera has been chasing the memory of RoseMarie Freni’s Turandot ever since. She was a dramatic soprano formed under a completely different tradition than what one hears today. I credit Fred Scott for bringing that sensibility to Atlanta in those days: He had a special ear for singers, and sometimes he would gamble and win big. Ironically, a comparison of repertoires would put Meade in a similar league as Fred Scott’s second pick for Turandot: Martile Rowland in 2000. The most glaring recollection I have of that performance was that Rowland was woefully miscast and, regrettably, disappeared soon after adding that role to her repertoire. 

HCWII: Meade is a whole different story altogether. She’s not in the RoseMarie Freni class at all, lacks the nuance of Stonikas and the sheer heft of Phillips. She may edge past Rowland in terms of sturdiness, but her vocalism invites regrets of a different kind. At baseline, she meets many of the basics requirements to produce an acceptable Turandot: She’s loud and survives the grueling tessitura well enough. However, the voice has suffered a lot ever since she added ridiculous assignments such as Aida, Chrysothemis and Sieglinde to her repertoire. The sound, and her use of it, remains all-purpose and unengaging. Dramatically I found her stage presence generally awkward and unsophisticated, and keep in mind that I am comparing this Turandot to previous performances I’ve seen with her, including her debut Turandot at LA Opera two years ago. To date,  this is the most physically involved I’ve ever seen her get with any character. 

DV: I have additional observations about the voice. While it has the edge to entertain its casting for dramatic soprano parts, a concerning unsteadiness has begun to creep in at all dynamics, and the wobble is becoming difficult to overlook. Also, and this is something that I’ve noticed in almost two decades of hearing her: the technique is not discreet. Meaning, there is little of the art that hides the art, so that I can hear the different levers she pulls to deploy the voice around the passagio and throughout her scale. This further emphasizes a lack of elegance in her phrasing, which savvier singers have at least managed to sell with a certain grandeur. 

HCWII: There’s an inescapable frustration associated with speaking about this singer and I wonder if you find keeping your feelings at bay as effortful as I do.

DV: No, for sure. Ever since she burst into the scene in 2008, it has been a case of the talent not lining up with the sort of artist we wished she would become. Have you read “Days with Ulanova”? The first chapter in that book is titled “Talent is work”. That chapter sets up the tone for a book describing a life of discipline, alongside a certain pride associated with the obsessive pursuit of fulfilling the burden of such talent. When we mentioned Rowland earlier, her name brought with it a genuine sense of regret, because she had been so extraordinary in a very specific type of Bel Canto and early Verdi parts that are so easily miscast today. I get very little of this type of thing from Ms. Meade, and I fear that my overall feelings regarding what she has to offer will likely remain neutral. By definition, this concerns me. In stark contrast, I felt completely different about Jonathan Burton. As soon as he was announced as being part of this cast I was hoping he would light the stage at the Cobb Energy Center stage on fire like he’s done countless times before in other theaters. I was rooting for him! And was a little crushed when I realized quickly enough that it was not to be.  

HCWII: Like you, I had high expectations of Mr. Burton. I believe he made his Atlanta Opera debut with these performances of Calaf and I must confess that I was rather disappointed with what I heard. He was constantly covered by the orchestra, and I was not sitting too far away from the stage. I have heard him in better vocal shape in previous occasions, and have been impressed by his breath control and his security at the top. Perhaps it has anything to do with him being a late replacement to Piero Pretti?

DV: I was taken aback by how uncharacteristically timid his singing appeared to be. I heard him knock Calaf out of the park 13 years ago in Sarasota, and just recently we both remarked how impressively he still sounded as Dick Johnson in Nashville’s production of La Fanciulla del West. The Cobb Energy Center is a much larger venue with different acoustics, and perhaps the last-minute assignment did not allow the necessary comfort zone to adjust his method to the new surroundings.  From my vantage point, I felt sometimes he may have tried to lean broader when deploying the top fortissimo, which has always been his calling card. It may have had an opposite effect. He did cash in the UNO reverse card gifted to all tenors, at least those performing in the United States, which absolves the sins of all Calafs as long as they can sing Nessun Dorma.

HCWII: Very fortunate for him, and his fellow Calafs of the past 32 years, that they’ve always reserved enough juice to squeeze a satisfying take on that aria. I would place Mr. Burton in the middle of the pack, above Paul Lyon (1994) and Eduardo Villa (2000), with Philip Webb (2007) and Gianluca Terranova (2017) above all.

DV: Gianluca was cool, and the most Italianate of the bunch. He had a wild personality onstage and I heard he was a handful during rehearsals. Eduardo was a tremendous talent and I recall 

him having a hard time bringing the weight of that massive voice to the top. The anecdotes that I heard since then claim that he was really allergic to ragweed and these were the pre-allegra days, so the success of many of his Atlanta performances were dependent on the evening’s pollen count.  I don’t have anything on Paul Lyons other than the voice having an easy top, but it was entirely too light to pay the bills as Calaf.

HCWII: He sang Radames at the Wiener Staatsoper and vanished afterwards.

DV: Well then, on that cheerful note, when we dial things back to the present. We are confronted with a familiar operatic situation: The principals have left the field open for the supporting roles to potentially take ownership of the night. By my count, Juliana Grigoryan’s Liu took that opportunity and ran with it. 

HCWII: Oh, she owned the night as soon as she sang that one line that anyone who knows the opera will judge a Liu by, the pianissimo B-flat when she says “Perché un dì nella reggia m’hai sorriso.” Everyone in the entire theatre was holding their breath at the same time while she held that note unwavering. You and I are the type that will travel to opera companies around the world to stumble upon that moment when a young artist spots their chance and takes it. This was one of those times. 

DV: There was something so spectacular about those soft notes, I almost want to call them fil di voce instead of piani. I had a minor temptation to complaints about what I felt may have been a certain self-indulgent way in which she was featuring them, almost as gimmicks, but I snapped out of it really quickly. If you do good Montserrat drag, by all means proceed. I did some intel on her after the show (using my crystal googleball) and I would clock her in her late 20s. So she’s a baby, the voice is in its youthful bloom, and there was a little bit of a personality baked into her singing. It was as if she seemed to put everyone in the theater on notice that she had arrived. And I support a singer with a personality, even a bratty one, as long as they have the vocal arsenal to back it up which she had in spades. 

HCWII: It was a large, warm voice, that call I wouldn’t Italianate per se. There was a edgeless quality to the way she produced dynamics that I think sets her apart from our previous Lius.

DV: The most vivid contrast I can conjure up is Kelly Kaduce (2017), who was working with a very different set of cards. That voice had a grittier central quality and could sour under pressure. But she was able to exploit the text to her advantage in ways that, perhaps, Ms. Grigoryan does not feel the need to consider in her moment of resplendent youth. For now. 

HCWII: Perhaps there was something to your earlier suggestion about them honoring Toscanini’s final stunt at the premiere, not just because Ms. Grigoryan’s radiant Liu stole the show, but because I also found Peixin Chen to be an excellent Timur. It’s ironic that Puccini seemed to all but ignore the bass voice throughout the bulk of his career, and in Turandot, right as Puccini fades away at the end of the funeral cortege, there is that choral segment that to me sounds a lot like Frederick Delius cantata in terms of color and harmony. It is very unexpected to hear in Puccini, and it might have been a clue as to where he could have kept going had he lived. I was glad to hear a beautiful, round bass like Mr. Chen’s give full justice to the great master’s final pages.

The Atlanta opera will close its 2025-26 season, and its historic first production of Wagner’s tetralogy The Ring of the Nibelung, this May with performances of Wagner’s The Twilight of the Gods. For more information, please visit the company’s website at www.atlantaopera.org

-Daniel Vasquez