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Indeed, about the only thing that could have saved this Turandot was an effective stage concept. But Serban, 41, the Rumanian-born theater director, who last season at the New York City Opera was responsible for a muddled, pseudo-avant-garde interpretation of Handel's Alcina, could never arrive at a consistent point of view. He crudely combined elements as disparate as Greek drama, Brechtian alienation (bare spotlights, plainly visible to the audience, illuminated the unit set) and—oddly in an opera that takes place in mythical China—conventions from the Japanese Kabuki and Noh theaters. Smaller details were just as mystifying. When the chorus pleaded for the moon to rise in the first act, it instead descended into what appeared to be an unlikely cross between a Chinese coachyard and the interior of the Globe Theater. And at the opera's conclusion, while Turandot and Calaf sang their love duet, Serban wheeled on the corpse of Liù aboard a bier, needlessly embellishing the point that Turandot is a Darwinianly brutal piece of work. Serban has been praised for his bold ideas in such plays as Chekhov's The Three Sisters in Cambridge, Mass., and Beaumarchais's The Marriage of Figaro in Minneapolis, but so far opera has not proved to be his métier.
By contrast, Strehler's La Tempesta, which goes to the Center for the Arts at the State University of New York, Purchase, this week, is a model of its kind, a meditation on artifice and reality that posits the magician Prospero (Tino Carraro) as a director whose powers seem supernatural only to his innocent daughter Miranda (Fabiana Udenio) and his fellow characters. The sexless sprite Ariel flies suspended from a deliberately evident pulley; like some monstrous, crabbed spider, Caliban emerges from an undisguised trap door. When, at the end of the play, Prospero's charms are all o'erthrown, the simple set shatters, and Ariel, freed, runs into the audience and away.
Strehler, 62, a co-founder of the Piccolo Teatro and a highly regarded opera director whose credits include Verdi and Mozart at La Scala, Paris and Salzburg, achieves several coups: in the opening storm, violent crashes of thunder and the roaring of waves accompany his stunning use of billowing fabric and collapsing spars to create a vivid picture of a ship's foundering; later, when Ariel is transformed into a screeching harpy who terrorizes King Alonso and his courtiers, the stage suddenly blackens, obscuring everything but the hovering spirit and the tantalizing banquet that torments the starving men. Else where, a weak sun, low on the horizon, struggles to burn through a stubborn mist, and wan, lonely music (by Fiorenzo Carpi) moodily conjures up the desolation of the enchanted island.