Madama Butterfly
The Usher Hall
One of the very few downsides of living in Edinburgh, along with the state of the roads, the not quite warm enough weather and the overabundance of trashy tourist shops, is the rarity of performances of opera here. So when the powers that be manage to programme the first night of Scottish Opera’s new and much-acclaimed ”Nixon in China” at the Festival Theatre to coincide with a one-off performance of Madama Butterfly at the Usher Hall, staged by Ellen Kent’s company, one despairs. Throw in an SCO concert of Haydn, Beethoven and Mozart in the Queen’s Hall at the same time, and you begin to think that the lunatics have taken over the asylum.
Billed as “a new production with exquisite sets, including a spectacular Japanese garden and fabulous costumes”, I was intrigued to see how Madama Butterfly would fit into the Usher Hall.
Well. first of all, it was very well attended. The Stalls and the Grand Circle were largely full, and the audience was attentive. A minor miracle had been achieved by putting the orchestra where the front rows of the Stalls would normally be, and the platform where the orchestra usually play was turned into a stage with a beautiful Japanese set, complete with water feature and a small house with working shutters. All the costumes were gorgeous, and the lighting exceptional, especially the shadow effects inside the house.
Premiered in 1904, “Butterfly” has become one of the most famous operas of all time, mixing Puccini’s wonderful melodic gift with a dramatic story of love and betrayal. Add in “oriental charm”, and one has a real audience favourite. It does nonetheless need really good singers, especially in the two lead roles for tenor and soprano, and the lesser roles must be played by good singing actors. The story is quite decadent. A US naval officer called Pinkerton rents a house near Nagasaki and arranges to marry a local girl, 15-year-old Cio Cio San (meaning butterfly lady). This is a marriage of convenience, as he plans to marry an American on his return to the US. Butterfly has no notion of all this and gives every ounce of her love to her husband. He is delighted with her and commits to the “marriage” fully.
Not long after, he returns to the States and forgets about her. Meanwhile, she gives birth to their son, and nurtures him, but is cursed by her Japanese family as a traitor. Three years later, Pinkerton returns with his American wife Kate, and the US consul Sharpless visits Butterfly to tell her about his arrival. She is overjoyed but fails to understand the nature of the visit, although agreeing to give up the child to Kate, on the condition that Pinkerton comes to see her once again. However, he is so weak that he cannot bring himself to come. Butterfly finally understands what has been happening and kills herself. It is actually very typical of Puccini’s opera plots that the scenarios are excruciatingly twisted (viz Tosca and Turandot especially) and Madama Butterfly is rightly known as a veritable tearjerker.
Dear reader, my tears were well and truly jerked. The singing was uniformly excellent and the small orchestra, conducted by the Moldovan Nicolae Dohotaru, was really good. A mixture of Ukrainians and Moldovans, they sounded much larger than their numbers suggested and played with real homogeneity and elan.
This was what one might call a Traditional Production, which can often mean dull. However, the cast had been well chosen and, for the most part, looked absolutely right for their roles, and acted very realistically. A newcomer to opera would have had no problem understanding the story (clear surtitles) and it was told in a simple but effective way.
Among the lesser roles, Ruslan Pacatovici, as Goro the Matchmaker, sleazed around very nicely, and Maria Tonina did what she had to do as Kate Pinkerton, the rat’s wife. Myroslava Shvakh-Pekar was a convincing and sympathetic Suzuki while Iurie Gisca was an excellent Sharpless, both vocally and dramatically.
Spanish tenor Giorgio Meladze as Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton impressed enormously, with his clear, ringing spinto tenor and he was a credible love rat. Every inch the young American hero, he dominated the stage, and I hope he realised the pantomime boos at the end were for his character, not his performance It was that sort of audience!
The Korean soprano, Elena Dee, was a magnificent Butterfly. Entirely believable as a 15-year-old child bride, although one trained as a geisha, she charted Cio Cio San’s tragic story perfectly, from naive waif to deeply moving suicidal heroine. Free and even throughout the range, wanting only a little vocal heft at the biggest moments, she was very much the star of the evening, and was rightly rewarded with an ovation at the end! I came tonight fearing I might be disappointed but left a very contented man.
