TURANDA (Antonio Bazzini) Como 2025 Anna Cimmarrusti, Weihao Du, Yonghyun Kim

Information on the Performance

• Work Title: Turanda  
• Composer: Bazzini Antonio   
• Libretto: Antonio Gazzoletti    Libretto Text, Libretto Index
• Venue & Opera Company: Teatro Sociale, Como, Italy, Conservatorio di Como  
• Recorded: October 26, 2025
• Type: Staged Opera Live
• Singers: Anna Cimmarrusti, Weihao Du, Yonghyun Kim, Minsu Kim, Aziza Omarova
• Conductor: Bruno Dal Bon  
• Orchestra: Filarmonica of the Conservatorio di Como  
• Chorus: Choir of the Conservatorio di Como  
• Chorus Master: Matteo Castelli, Domenico Innominato  
• Stage Director: Stefania Panighini  
• Costume Designer:   

Information about the Recording

• Published by: Conservatorio da Como  
• Date Published: 2026  
• Format: Streaming
• Quality Video: 4 Audio:4
• Subtitles: yessubs, itsubs  
• This Recording is NOT AVAILABLE from a proper commercial or public source

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION ON THIS PERFORMANCE

TURANDA

The work, begun with the rediscovery of the Turanda manuscript, aims to highlight this opera, which was performed only once at La Scala during the Carnival of 1867.
Interest focuses on the singularity of the female figure constructed by Antonio Bazzini: a young woman who, alone, fights against everyone, a social system that wants her to be nothing more than a wife and mother. An extraordinarily modern opera heroine who remained buried in a library for years.

The project is structured around a series of performances, lectures, and concerts aimed at a musical, historical, and philosophical reflection on the role of femininity in opera, and on the importance of bringing back to light lost texts that shed a different light on the usual repertoire.

 

Turanda is a fantastical play with distant roots, blending and merging with first-century Indian legends and the Italian Commedia dell’Arte: all tell of an extraordinary woman, capable in some versions of physically fighting many men at once, and in others of defeating them through intellectual acumen.

Turanda is an extraordinary girl, not yet a woman!

A girl who lives in a world of adult men, a social and above all religious world, built on age-old rules in which women – as we know well – do not access power, but give birth to men, who take power.

The extraordinary girl refuses to fit into the ordinary, she refuses to be simply a means of reproduction to ensure offspring, she shuns the idea of ​​being simply… a womb with a body around it.

So far so good, it would even seem that Bazzini and Gazzoletti were bastions of feminism ante litteram , nineteenth-century men with new-millennium visions, but no.

Turanda is a young girl who has never known love, indeed she stubbornly avoids it, but when she meets it (love) it tames her, changes her and – albeit with difficulty – conquers her: romanticism seems to replace feminism, sentiment to win over ideals.

An initial bitter disappointment, at not being able to ride Turanda as a bastion of nineteenth-century gender equality, is followed by a wonderful epiphany, the discovery that Turanda describes exactly what we all are: a brilliant coexistence of moral rules and weaknesses, of strong rational intentions and insinuating and seductive irrational crises, a melting pot of strengths and weaknesses, of masculine and feminine, of opposites that transform into complementaries and vice versa.

The theatre becomes a womb that gives birth to a woman.

The work is the gestation of a headstrong girl, who transforms into a complex and accomplished woman, a metaphor for the humanity that we all still desire today.

 

FROM MANUSCRIPT TO SCENE

Composed by Antonio Bazzini on a libretto by Antonio Gazzoletti, it was staged at the Teatro alla Scala on 13 January 1867. The story is taken from the drama Turandot by Carlo Gozzi, 

Turanda is the only theatrical work by Bazzini, a highly regarded composer of instrumental music, particularly for violin and quartet music. The opera’s subject is the same one that would later inspire Puccini’s more acclaimed unfinished opera (Puccini was Bazzini’s composition student), and it is dedicated to the highly modern (for the time) character of Turanda, who categorically rejects any dictates that might conflict with her womanhood. 

After a lukewarm debut, criticized in the contemporary press, the opera fell into total oblivion and was never performed again: all the manuscript material began a mysterious wandering from Bazzini’s personal archive, only to be donated to the Società dei Concerti di Brescia. This was followed by the “strange” disappearance of the four autographed volumes, which reappeared years later in the cellars of the Milan Conservatory. Equally fortunate was the rediscovery of the lost original libretto with the handwritten director’s notes from the first performance at La Scala.

The many signs of rediscovery bode well for a new rediscovery of the opera, which will see its first modern performance on October 26 at the Teatro Sociale in Como, with a production by the Como Conservatory, and a repeat performance at the Teatro Lirico in Milan.

Mo Marcoemilio Camera, professor and director of the Como Conservatory Library, will give a talk entitled Before “Turandot”: Rediscovering the Opera “Turanda” by Antonio Bazzini, from Manuscripts to the Stage, which will take place in Salzburg on Wednesday 9 July 2025 during the prestigious IAML (International Association of Music Libraries) conference.

Bazzini was born in Brescia, where he composed Turanda and donated all his autograph manuscript material to the Brescia Concert Society, which later found its way to the library of the city’s Conservatory. Mo Camera will retrace the curious history of this legacy, culminating in the critical edition edited by Antonio Moccia, which will be published by Casa Ricordi. It will be possible to view the extensive original manuscript material, drafts, and copies of the first performance. 

Bazzini’s connection to Milan stems from his teaching activity at the Milan Conservatory, where he taught composition and was also its director. Through random and mysterious circumstances, the entire Brescian autograph manuscript of Turanda, rediscovered a few years ago, ended up at the Milan Conservatory. The Braidense National Library, a prestigious Italian library of excellence in the heart of Milan, a stone’s throw from La Scala, is also home to the Ricordi Historical Archive, the publisher that later acquired the entire Lucca publishing house, the Milanese impresario and publisher who at the time held the rights to Turanda and published the libretto.


Quoted from Conservatorio di Como

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