There Is Power and Beauty in San Diego’s ‘Butterfly’
/By Truman C. Wang
4/29/2024
Photo credit: Karli Cadel | San Deigo Opera
Corinne Winters as Cio-Cio-San
The San Diego Opera’s new staging of Puccini’s Madama Butterfly had many things to recommend for it. It’s pleasing to the eye and the singing was topnotch. The stage décor was a simple immovable unit set of a Japanese house with a gangway connecting the land below (a nautical reference to Pinkerton’s ship USS Lincoln). Moveable paper panels revealed, discreetly, the silhouettes of the lovers in act one consummating their marriage and Cio-Cio-San’s suicide in act three. Dramatic mood lighting enhanced the love duet and the night vigil from dusk to dawn. Equally dramatic was the swirling and raining down of cherry blossom confetti during the flower duet. Director Jose Maria Confemi, not merely a traffic cop, did a fine job of matching the actions to the drama at hand and the characters’ emotions. In the final scene, a frustrated Cio-Cio-San was seen smashing her American living room décor, effectively ending her ‘American dream’.
Corinne Winters, the Cio-Cio-San (‘Cio-Cio’ means butterfly in Japanese), was a touching, detailed, and delicate heroine. Historically, there have been both heavy and light Butterflies. Rosina Storchio, the first La Scala Butterfly in 1904, was twenty-five and a light soprano; the Brescia Butterfly, Krusceniski, was a heavy Butterfly who also sang Isolde at La Scala. Either way, the soprano tackling the role should ideally give the illusion of a fifteen-year-old ‘plaything’ (says Kate Pinkerton in Long’s story and Belasco’s play) as well as packing great emotional force in the letter scene and finale. Ms. Winters is a light lyric soprano who possesses sweet tones and, in her phrasing and acting, a wide emotional range. Her aria, “Un bel dì” was especially beautiful and poignant. Adam Smith, the Pinkerton, had some ringing notes, but it’s not an Italianate voice. Kidon Choi lent his noble baritone to the sympathetic role the American consul Sharpless. All the comprimari – Stephanie Doche (Suzuki), Søren Pedersen (Yamadori), Joel Sorensen (Goro), DeAndre Simmons (Bonze) – delivered their lines admirably, including the six lines for Mrs. Pinkerton (sung by Emily Weinberg). Addison Smyres, playing Cio-Cio-San’s son ‘Trouble’, proved no trouble at all in her adorable stage presence.
Corinne Winters as Cio-Cio-San, Adam Smith as Pinkerton
Yves Abel, the conductor, gave a taut, powerful yet nuanced reading of the score, with idiomatic winds and honeyed strings from the exceptional opera orchestra. In the love duet, the orchestra seemed to envelope and carry the newlyweds in a sweet fragrant cloud in one of Debussy’s sea pictures. (The speaker in the pre-opera talk gave a convincing illustration of the Puccini-Debussy connection.) One minor quibble was the barely-audible humming chorus that would have benefited from amplification.
If you missed this Butterfly, you can catch it in L.A. Opera’s Art Deco staging in September. San Diego Opera’s 2024/25 60th-anniversary season will open on November 1 with La Bohème, followed by Salome in March and La Traviata in April.
curtain call on 4-28-2024. Photo credit: classicalvoice.org
Truman C. Wang is Editor-in-Chief of Classical Voice, whose articles have appeared in the Pasadena Star-News, San Gabriel Valley Tribune, other Southern California publications, as well as the Hawaiian Chinese Daily. He studied Integrative Biology and Music at U.C. Berkeley.