Mannes Opera Presents: Turandot & Puzzles and Games

Join us for this season's Opera in Concert!

A striking fairytale pairing from two very different worlds. Busoni’s urbane, witty Turandot, based on Carlo Gozzi’s 18th-century play and steeped in commedia dell’arte tradition, receives a rare outing in its 1971 concert version. In vivid counterpoint, Unsuk Chin’s Puzzles and Games is a fantastical sequence drawn from her acclaimed 2007 opera Alice in Wonderland, with a libretto by Tony Award–winner David Henry Hwang.

Rarely performed and full of theatrical daring, this double bill is also part of the renewed recognition of Busoni as one of the 20th century’s most important composers and teachers; while Chin’s score brims with playful rhythmic invention, dazzling orchestration, and a surreal sense of wonder, refracting Lewis Carroll’s world through a modern, global lens.

In one evening, audiences will travel from an early 20th-century European reinterpretation of an Italian fairytale set in China, to a 21st-century musical dreamscape born of British literature and Asian-American collaboration.

Join us!

Turandot: Ferruccio Busoni (1917; concert version 1971)

Libretto by Philipp Jarnach

Puzzles and Games: Unsuk Chin (2017; from 2007 opera Alice in Wonderland)

Libretto by David Henry Hwang

Conducted by Tong Chen

Directed by Mikhaela Mahony