Fine new Butterfly takes wing with a passion
Madama Butterfly (Glyndebourne Tour) Verdict: Opera’s great weepie ★★★✩✩
ONE fine day, of course, it had to come here. And now, with sometimes shocking intensity, Glyndebourne has at last staged opera’s greatest weepie Madama Butterfly — Puccini’s gloriously melodic, but emotionally devastating, assessment of East-West cultural chasms, wayward passion, betrayal and blighted love.
It begins the touring company’s new autumn and winter season and, as so often with this egalitarian offspring of the summer festival, brings with it some notable young talent, particularly South Korean soprano Karah Son in the title role.
In director Annilese Miskimmon’s bold and sometimes bleak new production (updated from early 20th-century Nagasaki to the Fifties) this Butterfly plausibly evolves from a vulnerable, fan-swishing, kimono-clad, 15-year-old child-bride to a deserted and Americanised single parent in a two-piece suit, puffing on cigarettes and reading Life magazine.
And Ms Son gives a heartbreaking, beautifully sung performance. It’s not a huge voice, but she uses it with passion and purity and her sensitive portrayal captures all the vulnerability and confusion of an outcast struggling to find an identity between two cultures.
Ardent singing, too, from Italian tenor Matteo Lippi as her girl-in-every-port lover, Pinkerton, and sympathetic performances from Claudia Huckle and Francesco Verna as Suzuki and Sharpless. But the production veers alarmingly between cynicism and romanticism, the first act losing much of its charm by being set in the office of the marriage broker, Goro, where two G.I. cash-and-carry marriages are sardonically dispensed with before Butterfly even arrives.
Conductor John Wilson takes a break from his more familiar forays into film and show music to find the full emotional swell of this extraordinary score. He certainly knows his Puccini and his shattering orchestral climax had me pinned to my seat.
The Glyndebourne Tour is sponsored by the Daily Mail and is at Glyndebourne until November 4, then Milton Keynes, Canterbury, Norwich, Woking and Plymouth. For details, see glyndebourne.com