Mauceri’s ‘Turandot’ lets the music shine

The Hollywood Bowl, it goes without saying, is no place for subtlety. John Mauceri, the conductor who presides over the Bowl more than any other, knows that and operates his Hollywood Bowl Orchestra accordingly. I mean that not as complaint but as compliment for a musician attuned to his environment and his audience. His concert performance of Puccini’s “Turandot” on Sunday night attempted neither subtlety nor theatricality. But it wasn’t without drama. It worked.

The Bowl band’s trademark is that nothing written for stage or screen is beneath it and that there is no music that can’t be gussied up with a few gimmicks. Twirl those basses, light that shell, crank up the amplification, crack a few jokes, bring on the crooner, shoot off fireworks. That works too.

Except for a few candy-cane lighting tricks on the shell, “Turandot,” though, was curiously minimalist. The singers stood and sang. They weren’t much to look at, and the video cameras did them few favors. There were no translations of the Italian libretto.

Instead, Mauceri trusted the audience’s aural imagination, letting the music pretty much speak for itself. That can be a recipe for disaster at the Bowl, where the crowd’s concentration is easily diverted by culinary recipes. Not this time.

Mauceri’s success began with his excellent introductions to each act: concisely telling the story, providing a few useful clues as to what to listen for and inserting intriguing, obscure historical details. His first battle was won; he had his audience’s attention.

It also helped that Mauceri has a way with “Turandot.” The last time he attempted Puccini’s last opera hereabouts, it was for an amateurish Opera Pacific production that had only flashy conducting and a loud soprano going for it. This time, he had flashy conducting, a reliable cast and no distractions of cheap sets or, with one exception, bad acting.

The exception was Andrea Gruber as Turandot. The New York soprano, who has sung the role at the Metropolitan Opera and La Scala, is a real curiosity. She has the rich, chesty tone of an alto but opens up with impressive power and surety in higher registers. However, she does little dramatically with that surprising power. Not exactly an ice princess, she instead struck B-movie dragon-lady poses. For further effect, she often snapped her head back as punchy punctuation to the end of a phrase, as if singing had something in common with the choppy body language of a prizefighter.

Well-known Canadian tenor Richard Margison, for his part, delivered a performance as unfazed by those vocal punches as by anything that Puccini could throw at him. His Calaf may have lacked romantic ardor, but there is much to be said for a truly reliable tenor who never falters, is ever dignified and holds steady on the high Cs.

Hei-Kyung Hong was an affecting Liu, the slave girl and only sympathetic main character in the opera, in a Los Angeles Opera production two years ago. Sunday she sang to the top rows of the Bowl, which was probably a good tactic under the circumstances but also meant that suddenly “Turandot” had three heroic singers, not two.

The rest of the cast -- Timur (Oren Gradus), Ping (Marcus DeLoach), Pang (Doug Jones), Pong (Chad Berlinghieri), the Emperor (Joseph Frank), the Mandarin (James Martin Schaefer), the Pacific Chorale and the Los Angeles Children’s Chorus -- came through without standing out. Ping, Pang and Pong were unfunny.

But Mauceri made up for any missing theatricality by providing considerable splash and atmosphere from the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra. And, given what had to be very limited rehearsal time for putting together a complicated opera, he marshaled his forces with great skill. Clearly, his first priority was getting the music right, and he did.