Butterfly that stings like a bee
Madama Butterfly (Glyndebourne Festival) Verdict: Tough love ★★★★✩
TRADITIONALISTS beware — this year’s festival opens with an uncompromisingly cynical view of Puccini’s enduring assessment of cultural chasms, girl-in-every-port betrayals and blighted love.
It may not be the usual sentimental wallow, but if you have tears, prepare to shed them. Director Annilese Miskimmon’s unconventional staging (first seen on the 2016 Glyndebourne Tour) updates the action to the Fifties, and though it doesn’t always work it packs a hefty punch.
And it introduces a fine new protagonist in the Moldovan soprano Olga Busuioc.
Busuioc is a pupil of the legendary Italian soprano Mirella Freni — and she does her proud. She sings thrillingly. One Fine Day is compellingly delivered directly to the audience and she inhabits the 15-year-old Japanese geisha with total conviction, touchingly passive and innocent in the first act, but later much tougher (though still vulnerable) as she adopts Western ways.
That first act, though, is a problem. Miskimmon sets it in the marriage broker’s office, not Butterfly’s new home. Here, child brides are casually bartered in blatant cash-and-carry GI marriages. Tough love, indeed, but at odds with the music’s emotional swell.
Later, as Butterfly yearns for her sail-away American husband and struggles to find an identity between two cultures, the updating adds an ironic new dimension to this much-cliched classic. The beautifully sung Humming Chorus is ‘played’ on Butterfly’s radiogram!
There’s strong singing, too, from Joshua Guerrero’s two- timing Lt. Pinkerton, Elizabeth DeShong’s outstanding Suzuki and Michael Sumuel’s sympathetic Sharpless.
The London Philharmonic Orchestra responds with glorious, unbridled passion to Israeli conductor Omer Meir Wellber. This is the first time Puccini’s masterpiece has been seen at this summer festival. It’s been worth the wait.