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Olga Busuioc (Cio-Cio-San) and Joshua Guerrero (Pinkerton) in Madama Butterfly at Glyndebourne.
‘Tragic pathos’: Olga Busuioc (Cio-Cio-San) and Joshua Guerrero (Pinkerton) in Madama Butterfly at Glyndebourne. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Observer
‘Tragic pathos’: Olga Busuioc (Cio-Cio-San) and Joshua Guerrero (Pinkerton) in Madama Butterfly at Glyndebourne. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Observer

The week in classical: Madama Butterfly; Britten Sinfonia/Adès – review

This article is more than 5 years old

Glyndebourne, Lewes; Barbican & Milton Court, London
The summer opera season kicks off with Annilese Miskimmon’s perceptive staging of Puccini’s heartbreaker. Plus, Adès, Barry and Beethoven, part two…

No need to rehearse the strange but limited parallels of a mixed-race marriage and a groom in uniform. Indeed it all felt quite potent that sunny Saturday afternoon a week ago, the opening of Glyndebourne’s new season. Puccini’s Madama Butterfly (1904), one of the world’s most adored and desolate operas, was about to make its first appearance in the festival’s 84-year history. In a brief welcome, Gus Christie, executive chairman and acting artistic director, concentrated on topical topography. A new duchess of Sussex – not yet an opera-goer but perhaps a future patron – had been anointed hours earlier, he said, with home pride.

The opening of Glyndebourne, senior member of an increasingly large and flourishing family, marks the start of the country house opera season. The company has had to hold its nerve of late, challenged by the improving quality of other festivals such as Garsington, Grange Park Opera, Longborough, the Grange, Holland Park Opera. Next month, Nevill Holt, in Leicestershire, opens a new, purpose-built theatre. Programmes everywhere are more diverse, with world premieres, community work and a commitment to involving those who cannot afford top-price tickets (screenings, streamings, performances on the beach).

Glyndebourne has always led the way and yet now must struggle to keep up. Currently advertising for a new artistic director (see Guardian Jobs, closing 8 June) following the abrupt exit in December of Sebastian Schwarz, it may have managerial problems but shows no shortage of artistic vim, as Brett Dean’s triumphant Hamlet last year and a new singing competition in March this year demonstrated. On paper, the 2018 season doesn’t look the strongest (two Handel revivals may be one too many), but with a freshly cast Rosenkavalier and new productions of Pelléas et Mélisande and Barber’s Vanessa we may, a normal habit in this job, be eating our words.

Butterfly is new to the festival, but Annilese Miskimmon’s staging was premiered as part of the 2016 Glyndebourne tour. Encountering it for the first time – and I gather after some reworking – I admired its perception and clarity, shorn of cherry-blossom prettiness but not without beauty; dispassionate about the cynical manoeuvres of the Japanese marriage broker, Goro, and his American imperialist client, Pinkerton, yet full of heart. The shattered optimism of Cio-Cio-San (Butterfly), intensely sung and acted, after a hesitant start, by Olga Busuioc, hit harder than ever.

In Miskimmon’s reading, sensuously and expertly played by the London Philharmonic Orchestra under the eagerly responsive baton of Omer Meir Wellber, all are complicit in the deal, including the 15-year-old girl herself. She is innocent but not ignorant, perfectly aware of the American habit of securing butterflies with a pin. Pinkerton, sung with soaring, wilful, preening grace by Joshua Guerrero, waits for a “real” American bride, while delighting in this gorgeous stop-gap arrangement he’s fixed for himself. Remorse comes, all too late. The consul, Sharpless, richly and sympathetically portrayed by Michael Sumuel, alone warns him of pending disaster.

The 1950s setting, designed by Nicky Shaw, takes its cue from the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, which gave Japanese women a chance to settle in America with their US servicemen husbands. The opening takes place in Goro’s marriage bureau in Nagasaki, conveniently next door to a seedy, neon-lit hotel. We see flickering images of available love candidates, and cine reels about how to be an American wife. As the scene unfolds, the literal-minded will object to this functional office turning, far from completely, into the marital bedroom, but Puccini’s insistent, ecstatic score, aided by Mark Jonathan’s skilled lighting design, does the job of magical transformation. When we do see Butterfly at home, she has embraced wholeheartedly the US way of life: cigarettes, radiogram, furniture – G Plan-style (though not, in fact, since that was a British brand). She dresses, with tragic pathos, in tight skirt, jacket and heels, almost identical, except in colour, to the clothes Mrs Pinkerton herself wears in the opera’s terrible closing moments.

Elizabeth DeShong, left, as Suzuki with Olga Busuioc as Cio-Cio-San. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Observer

The finest performance was that of Elizabeth DeShong, kindly, angry, desperate as the maid Suzuki, with fervent, resonant low notes. Supporting roles were well taken by Carlo Bosi (Goro), Simon Mechlinski (Prince Yamadori) and an ensemble including Jennifer Witton, Michael Mofidian, Oleg Budaratskiy. Ida Ränzlöv as the put-upon Kate Pinkerton made the most of her tiny, devastating role. For once you could believe she really was kind enough to take on Butterfly and Pinkerton’s child, while no doubt damning her husband’s crass desires. We must hope she changed the boy’s name from Sorrow (acted with still confidence by Rupert Wade).

The composer-conductor Thomas Adès has likened the progress of Beethoven’s nine symphonies to the geological eras of the Earth, with No 5 in C minor – that most famous touchstone of western music – erupting out of the volcanic age. Reaching the mid-point of his Beethoven cycle with the Britten Sinfonia, Adès proved his point last week. Together with the lithe and airborne No 4 in B flat, he conducted the Fifth with febrile grandeur, as if surprised himself at Beethoven’s unpredictable, rule-breaking brilliance. The work’s tense coda, blasting into C major, had the Britten Sinfonia, playing with period awareness and little vibrato, almost rising out of their seats with the challenge of speed, volume and finesse.

Thomas Adès conducts the Britten Sinfonia. Photograph: Chris Christodoulou

A feature of this series is the pairing of Beethoven with music by his committed disciple, the Irish composer Gerald Barry (b1952). You might think all composers were Beethoven devotees. Far from it. Stravinsky told Proust he detested Beethoven, though you might argue his music is full of his influence. Nicolas Hodges was soloist in the London premiere of Barry’s Piano Concerto, which is – in the most riveting fashion – more like a confrontation between giant, automated punchbags, pounding out Beethovenian scales and raucous chords in jubilant, self-possessed combat. Catch this terrific programme tonight in Norwich, or on Radio 3 iPlayer.

On Wednesday at Milton Court, Adès turned pianist, with tenor Allan Clayton performing Beethoven’s An die ferne Geliebte (1816), pivotal in the history of the song cycle, though Beethoven complained he disliked writing songs. Clayton, as expressive a performer as you could wish, showed that in fact Beethoven was rather good at it. In a concert dominated by the key of E flat, including the Quintet for Piano and Winds, Adès created an atmosphere of intimacy with Britten Sinfonia principals Alex Wide, horn; Timothy Rundle, oboe; Joy Farrall, clarinet; and Sarah Burnett, bassoon. Clayton was back to perform, with comic frenzy, Barry’s Jabberwocky (2012), the text crazy enough in Lewis Carroll’s original, but now translated into French (Le Jaseroque) and German (Der Jammerwoch). If you never understood it in English – maybe I’ll end mid-sentence like Barry’s wild creation itself.

Star ratings (out of 5)
Madama Butterfly
★★★★
Britten Sinfonia/Adès: Symphonies ★★★★★
Britten Sinfonia/Adès: Chamber music ★★★★

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