"And then, Tristan," Puccini wrote cryptically on the manuscript of his sketches for the final love duet of Turandot. He died before writing it and generations of commentators have subsequently wondered whether he could have pulled off a scene that rivalled Wagner's Tristan und Isolde in its eroticism. Turandot was, of course, completed by Puccini's younger contemporary Franco Alfano. Many have found the result musically wanting and psychologically implausible, not least Luciano Berio, who has now produced an ending of his own and one that tries to grapple with Turandot's at times troubling erotics.
There was a sadomasochistic streak in Puccini's temperament and Turandot places its hero, Calaf, between the dominatrixy princess, who gives the opera its title, and Liu, the slave girl, who willingly accepts torture and death rather than betray him. Berio has castigated Alfano for leaving Liu out of the musical equation after her suicide and for "turning back to Calaf and his perpetual erection". He also confronts the other worrying aspect of the opera's ending, namely that Calaf breaks down Turandot's chastity with what is effectively a sexual assault that she seemingly enjoys.
His ending is darker, steering the score away from Alfano's sub-Puccinian grandeur towards modernism as the harmonic palette turns increasingly dissonant and the sonorities take on the queasy, refracted glitter of early Schoenberg. Stabbing brass herald Calaf's attack on Turandot, which is followed by an extended chromatic interlude that takes in Puccini's Wagnerian allusion by weaving round the so-called "Tristan chord". Alfano's gaudy close is replaced by quiet, querulous uncertainty.
Ideally, one wants to hear Berio's version in the context of the complete work. For the UK premiere, however, the final act alone had to suffice, conducted by Leonard Slatkin with a nervous urgency - not entirely inappropriate for the terror generated by the princess's despotism. The casting was uneven, with Eva Urbanova's thrillingly ferocious Turandot pitted against Dennis O'Neill's clarion Calaf and Amanda Roocroft's occasionally effortful Liu. The act was preceded by a collection of vaguely related works. Bits of Weber's incidental music for the play Puccini took as his source were wedged against the gamelan-inspired Tabuh-tabuhan by Colin McPhee, and Hindemith's Symphonic Metamorphoses on Themes by Weber, that takes the latter's Turandot as its starting point. Slatkin's performances of all three were less than ideal.
