Madama Butterfly
The Ukrainian National Opera of Odessa
New Theatre
Friday 4th February 2005

My previous experiences of touring opera companies from Eastern Europe and Russia had ranged from the breathtakingly sumptuous to the endearingly inept. I sat waiting for the curtain to rise on this performance by the Ukrainian National Opera with a range of inconsistent and conflicting hopes and expectations. I walked out both satisfied and dissatisfied – I had witnessed a professional performance revealing not only flair, finesse and great artistry, but also sloppiness, inconsistency and perhaps a culture clash .

The orchestra sets proceedings in motion, with strings slithering around with decidedly imperfect ensemble. Was this good or bad? I do not know. My professional sensibilities wished the conductor would impose more discipline. My critical faculties remembered Richard Strauss’s complaints that orchestras played his works entirely too accurately, and I was forced to concede that the overall effect was most exciting. Was this, then, a valid performance decision, albeit one that no British conductor would dare take? Sadly, subsequent moments convinced me otherwise. Some of the woodwind tuning was simply beyond the pale; and time and again the orchestra would flatten out a phrase, entirely disregarding the singer’s nuances and as a result drowning out many intense, soft vocal moments. This said, the technical difficulties facing touring opera companies at unfamiliar venues are formidable, and there were sounds of quite ethereal beauty conjured from the orchestra.

The singing was excellent, with no weak links. The casting and acting was compelling, but subtly different from more Western productions I’ve encountered. Pinkerton was horrifyingly young and self-centred, while Cio-Cio-San was maddeningly trusting and luminous (although utterly exhausted by the time of the curtain calls: barely able to bow, let alone smile at the adulatory audience). Both Consul Sharpless and Mrs Kate did wonders at characterising slim roles. However, the servant Goro shamelessly mugged his part’s latent comedy: I found the sharply contrasting acting styles on stage jarred, but it was so overt that it was clearly an artistic choice, not careless direction. Similarly, I found the crowd scenes disconcerting: for instance, the body language of the bride’s massed female entourage was alternately very Eastern then very Western.

The set followed the apparently unavoidable template for Madama Butterfly – a paper-walled pavilion set in gardens – but was immediately arresting: bright, colourful, animated and highly detailed. As the opera progressed, however, I became increasingly disenchanted. Everything was *so* colourful: bamboo was vivid yellow, leaves were extravagantly verdant, flowers and blossoms vied with each other for intensity of shade. With its peripheral clutter and yellow flooring, the set began to feel more like a plasticky display at a garden centre than a Japanese oasis of cultured serenity. The water fountains on the left began to sputter noisily in Act II, while the wet sheet of glass on the right (representing a pool/waterfall, complete with golden koi) had an unfortunate tendency to act as a mirror, picking up anyone centre-stage. Perverse details began distracting me: the ridiculously vertiginous Mt Fuji on the backdrop, or the foreground willow whose weeping branches were artfully arranged in the shape of a giant parrot.

Overall I much enjoyed the evening. The reservations expressed in this review should demonstrate the extent to which the production grabbed me and made me react. I was moved by the production, and much look forward to the Ukrainian National Opera’s next visit to Oxford.

Julian Stewart
05/02/05