Recently in Performances

ETO Autumn 2020 Season Announcement: Lyric Solitude

English Touring Opera are delighted to announce a season of lyric monodramas to tour nationally from October to December. The season features music for solo singer and piano by Argento, Britten, Tippett and Shostakovich with a bold and inventive approach to making opera during social distancing.

Love, always: Chanticleer, Live from London … via San Francisco

This tenth of ten Live from London concerts was in fact a recorded live performance from California. It was no less enjoyable for that, and it was also uplifting to learn that this wasn’t in fact the ‘last’ LfL event that we will be able to enjoy, courtesy of VOCES8 and their fellow vocal ensembles (more below …).

Dreams and delusions from Ian Bostridge and Imogen Cooper at Wigmore Hall

Ever since Wigmore Hall announced their superb series of autumn concerts, all streamed live and available free of charge, I’d been looking forward to this song recital by Ian Bostridge and Imogen Cooper.

Treasures of the English Renaissance: Stile Antico, Live from London

Although Stile Antico’s programme article for their Live from London recital introduced their selection from the many treasures of the English Renaissance in the context of the theological debates and upheavals of the Tudor and Elizabethan years, their performance was more evocative of private chamber music than of public liturgy.

A wonderful Wigmore Hall debut by Elizabeth Llewellyn

Evidently, face masks don’t stifle appreciative “Bravo!”s. And, reducing audience numbers doesn’t lower the volume of such acclamations. For, the audience at Wigmore Hall gave soprano Elizabeth Llewellyn and pianist Simon Lepper a greatly deserved warm reception and hearty response following this lunchtime recital of late-Romantic song.

The Sixteen: Music for Reflection, live from Kings Place

For this week’s Live from London vocal recital we moved from the home of VOCES8, St Anne and St Agnes in the City of London, to Kings Place, where The Sixteen - who have been associate artists at the venue for some time - presented a programme of music and words bound together by the theme of ‘reflection’.

Iestyn Davies and Elizabeth Kenny explore Dowland's directness and darkness at Hatfield House

'Such is your divine Disposation that both you excellently understand, and royally entertaine the Exercise of Musicke.’

Paradise Lost: Tête-à-Tête 2020

‘And there was war in heaven: Michael and his angels fought against the dragon; and the dragon fought and his angels, And prevailed not; neither was their place found any more in heaven … that old serpent … Satan, which deceiveth the whole world: he was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him.’

Joyce DiDonato: Met Stars Live in Concert

There was never any doubt that the fifth of the twelve Met Stars Live in Concert broadcasts was going to be a palpably intense and vivid event, as well as a musically stunning and theatrically enervating experience.

‘Where All Roses Go’: Apollo5, Live from London

‘Love’ was the theme for this Live from London performance by Apollo5. Given the complexity and diversity of that human emotion, and Apollo5’s reputation for versatility and diverse repertoire, ranging from Renaissance choral music to jazz, from contemporary classical works to popular song, it was no surprise that their programme spanned 500 years and several musical styles.

The Academy of St Martin in the Fields 're-connect'

The Academy of St Martin in the Fields have titled their autumn series of eight concerts - which are taking place at 5pm and 7.30pm on two Saturdays each month at their home venue in Trafalgar Square, and being filmed for streaming the following Thursday - ‘re:connect’.

Lucy Crowe and Allan Clayton join Sir Simon Rattle and the LSO at St Luke's

The London Symphony Orchestra opened their Autumn 2020 season with a homage to Oliver Knussen, who died at the age of 66 in July 2018. The programme traced a national musical lineage through the twentieth century, from Britten to Knussen, on to Mark-Anthony Turnage, and entwining the LSO and Rattle too.

Choral Dances: VOCES8, Live from London

With the Live from London digital vocal festival entering the second half of the series, the festival’s host, VOCES8, returned to their home at St Annes and St Agnes in the City of London to present a sequence of ‘Choral Dances’ - vocal music inspired by dance, embracing diverse genres from the Renaissance madrigal to swing jazz.

Royal Opera House Gala Concert

Just a few unison string wriggles from the opening of Mozart’s overture to Le nozze di Figaro are enough to make any opera-lover perch on the edge of their seat, in excited anticipation of the drama in music to come, so there could be no other curtain-raiser for this Gala Concert at the Royal Opera House, the latest instalment from ‘their House’ to ‘our houses’.

Fading: The Gesualdo Six at Live from London

"Before the ending of the day, creator of all things, we pray that, with your accustomed mercy, you may watch over us."

Met Stars Live in Concert: Lise Davidsen at the Oscarshall Palace in Oslo

The doors at The Metropolitan Opera will not open to live audiences until 2021 at the earliest, and the likelihood of normal operatic life resuming in cities around the world looks but a distant dream at present. But, while we may not be invited from our homes into the opera house for some time yet, with its free daily screenings of past productions and its pay-per-view Met Stars Live in Concert series, the Met continues to bring opera into our homes.

Precipice: The Grange Festival

Music-making at this year’s Grange Festival Opera may have fallen silent in June and July, but the country house and extensive grounds of The Grange provided an ideal setting for a weekend of twelve specially conceived ‘promenade’ performances encompassing music and dance.

Monteverdi: The Ache of Love - Live from London

There’s a “slide of harmony” and “all the bones leave your body at that moment and you collapse to the floor, it’s so extraordinary.”

Music for a While: Rowan Pierce and Christopher Glynn at Ryedale Online

“Music for a while, shall all your cares beguile.”

A Musical Reunion at Garsington Opera

The hum of bees rising from myriad scented blooms; gentle strains of birdsong; the cheerful chatter of picnickers beside a still lake; decorous thwacks of leather on willow; song and music floating through the warm evening air.

OPERA TODAY ARCHIVES »

Performances

Rena Harms as Madama Butterfly and David Butt Philip as Pinkerton [Photo © Tom Bowles]
21 May 2016

Madame Butterfly , ENO

Anthony Minghella’s production of Madame Butterfly for ENO is wearing well. First seen in 2005, it is now being aired for the sixth time and is still, as I observed in 2013, ‘a breath-taking visual banquet’.

Madame Butterfly , ENO

A review by Claire Seymour

Above: Rena Harms as Madama Butterfly and David Butt Philip as Pinkerton [Photo © Tom Bowles]

 

So much depends upon Peter Mumford’s stunning lighting design which in the opening moments floods Minghella’s cinematic vista with the fiery red of the rising sun against which a geisha’s silhouette curves and bends in elegant pirouettes and graceful bows, her folding-fan catching the sun’s gold as it flutters like a butterfly wing. Mumford’s colours are stirringly vibrant but, paradoxically, shift subtly from hue to hue. Acidic orange fades to an apricot which mutates to dusky rose, then deepens through cerise to purple: it is as if we are sliding through a shimmering rainbow, an oxymoronic fusion of intensity and insubstantiality.

Above the stage a shiny dark slope hangs, lacquer-black, hazily and suggestively reflecting the shifting movements and colours below — like a liquid mirror. Mumford illuminates Han Feng’s glorious rich-coloured and glossy textured costumes with searing intensity. When day turns to night, the preciousness and fragility of Pinkerton’s and Cio-Cio-San’s delusory dreaming at the end of Act 1 is evoked by the raindrops of blush-tintedsakura petals which float down between the drifting paper lantern-domes, forming trailing fronds of starlight — reminiscent of the hannabi displays so familiar of Japanese summer nights. At the close, the burning crimson returns: as Butterfly commits ritual self-sacrifice, the trains of her kimono, with which the black-clad dancers of Blind Sight encircle and bind her at the opening, now unravel like streams of blood, drowning all in guilt and repentance.

The visual opulence made even more impact than I remembered from my previous viewings. As the characters entered from the rear via the crest of designer Michael Levine’s sharply sloping stage, the nation’s culture of regal ceremony and ritual was powerfully intimated. The sliding shoji swept across the minimalist stage forming countless spatial permutations, like the screens of a magician who deftly tricks us with his optical illusions and mirages.

The dancers and puppeteers of Blind Summit were also even more hypnotic and dexterous than I remembered, pulsing and swirling with a dangerous energy (choreography is by Carolyn Choa). The mime-dance at the start of Act 2 Scene 2 where a fan/knife makes ambiguous patterns in the air, foreshadowing Butterfly’s suicide, was compelling and disquieting.

Moreover, the intimations aroused by the extraordinarily sensitive manipulations of the bunraku puppet which embodies Butterfly’s child, Swallow, were truly affecting — highly nuanced and allusive. Tiny footsteps suggested both animation and the unsteadiness of youthful feet; a backwards glance at his mother conveyed an unquestioning love and trust as the child stumbled towards the out-stretched hand of the American Consul. Moreover where I previously found the uncanny veracity of the marionette rather distancing and alien, now the ‘strangeness’ seemed to perfectly convey the clash of cultures. Cio-Cio-San has declared her allegiance to her husband’s United States of America and invites the Consul her house — a tiny part of ‘home’ in this ‘foreign’ land — proudly and defiantly revealing her blue-eyed child. But, the stylisation of the puppet’s movements belies the sailor-suit he wears: he is exotic, Japanese, a literal representation of that culture’s traditions and values.

It was a pity, then, that the cast’s achievements were so mixed. In the title role, American soprano Rena Harms was a surprisingly confident — and at times coquettish — fifteen-year-old in Act 1. I have lived in Japan and I have yet to see a Japanese woman laugh without turning her face and covering her mouth, but this young geisha was full of self-possession, aware of her own charm. This Butterfly really was more American than Japanese. Harms’ soprano is fairly light and when challenged to rise above the ENO orchestra — who were encouraged to play with rather too much enthusiasm and force at times by conductor Sir Richard Armstrong — her voice acquired a slightly hard edge and astringency. More spinto strength was needed — such as was exhibited by Stephanie Windsor-Lewis who was a sympathetic Suzuki — so that the dramatic climaxes could be conquered without strain. A Romantic fullness would have benefitted ‘One fine day’, where the instrumental doubling tended to obscure the vocal line in the lower registers. Disappointing, too, was Harms’ diction: scarcely a consonant was audible and vowels were oddly distorted — the surtitles which should be redundant in a house which prides itself on performing in English were absolutely essential. The only, partial saving grace was that one was not distracted by the inappropriate intonation and tone of the English language within this Italianate idiom.

The same could not be said of David Butt Philip whose F.B. Pinkerton was the epitome of RP. In fact, so elevated in style and tone was his diction that he was more reserved English gentleman than swaggering Yankee. But, he sang with consistently stylish phrasing and, though his tenor is not a big voice, was able to project without vocal tension.

This Pinkerton seemed bewildered at how such things had come to pass. Taken together with Harms’ assertiveness, this altered the tragic dynamic between the protagonists and between Butterfly and her environment. Pinkerton was less a villain than a naïve romantic, too immature to reflect on consequences; Butterfly less a victim than a misguided dreamer, desperate to assume the regalia of Pinkerton’s idealised fantasy.

When I heard George von Bergen in the role of the American Consul Sharpless in 2013 I was not overly impressed, finding him resonant but lacking in focus, dramatically and vocally. On this occasion, he was the leading light. Singing with excellent diction and real vocal warmth, his compassion and contrition when confronted with Butterfly’s unwavering faith and love was utterly convincing, and more affecting in the light of his earlier complicity in Pinkerton’s colonial presumption.

Alun Rhys-Jenkins reprised his Goro of 2013 but while his phrasing and tone were engaging, I found this marriage broker less vivacious and mischievous than at the previous hearing. Matthew Durkan was a noble Prince Yamadori but his implorings did not equal the majesty of his ceremonial attire. Mark Richardson, also returning to the production, made a menacing impression as The Bonze, Butterfly’s fierce uncle. Samantha Price sang confidently as Kate Pinkerton.

Overall, whatever the unevenness in the casting, this Butterfly is worth catching for the ocular sumptuousness and gratification that it supplies in to heady excess.

Claire Seymour


Cast and production details:

Cio-Cio-San — Rena Harms, Suzuki — Stephanie Windsor-Lewis, Pinkerton — David Butt Philip, Sharpless — George van Bergen, Goro — Alun Rhys-Jenkins, Prince Yamadori — Matthew Durkan, The Bonze — Mark Richardson, Yakuside — Philip Daggett, Kate Pinkerton — Samantha Price, Imperial Commissioner — Paul Napier-Burrows, Official Registrar — Roger Begley, Cio-Cio-San’s Mother — Natalie Herman, Cousin — Morag Boyle, Aunt — Judith Douglas, Sorrow — Laura Caldow, Tom Espiner, Irena Stratieva; director — Anthony Minghella (revival director — Sarah Tipple), associate director/choreographer — Carolyn Choa (revival choreographer — Anita Griffin), set designer — Michael Levine, lighting designer — Peter Mumford (revival lighting designer — Ian Jackson-French), costume designer — Han Feng, Orchestral and Chorus of English National Opera, puppetry — Blind Summit Theatre, Mark Down & Nick Barnes. English National Opera at the London Coliseum, Wednesday 18th May 2016.

Send to a friend

Send a link to this article to a friend with an optional message.

Friend's Email Address: (required)

Your Email Address: (required)

Message (optional):