Madam Butterfly
Coliseum, London WC2
Renee Fleming
Barbican, London EC2
BBC SO/Boulez
Barbican, London EC2
How to portray a two-year-old on the stage? In the case of Puccini's Madam Butterfly, it is usually done with a wide-eyed, if slightly older, boy - the product of our heroine's wedding night with the treacherous American sailor Pinkerton, and the figure at the emotional heart of the opera. Anthony Minghella's solution is to use a marionette.
Well, a marionette may act better than a two-year-old, but it's something of a problem when he's manipulated, however expertly, by three masked men, who must follow the little fellow around wherever he goes. This is the Bright Idea that the Oscar-winning film director brings to his first opera staging: a lavish, West End-style version of the Puccini heartbreaker, rather more Miss Saigon than Madam Butterfly.
It may be authentically Bunraku, and the audience seemed to love it; but I found the puppet arch, and a distraction from more important matters such as Butterfly's deluded preparations for Pinkerton's return. The same goes for the huge, angled mirror above the stage - as in fellow film director Mario Martone's Ballo in Maschera for Covent Garden, which returns this week; it makes for some dramatic effects - notably at Butterfly's overly grand entrance - but seeing everything that's going on behind the scenes can be a mixed blessing.
Michael Levine's sets and Han Feng's costumes bring a riot of colour to the sliding panels so often used in stage depictions of Japanese home life, marred only by the use of those Habitat lamp-shades of Sixties ubiquity. Amid showers of the usual cherry blossom, Minghella's heavily stylised reading was at times infected by the sentimentality that can mar his films; when Pinkerton picked up Butterfly to carry her to bed, I was reminded of that cringe-making moment in The English Patient when Ralph Fiennes carries Kristin Scott Thomas into a cave, with the same thing in mind.
Even more has gone wrong (or you've got an ignorant first-night audience) when there is giggling as Christopher Purves's noble Sharpless curses Pinkerton as the 'bastard' he is. The sheer bulk of Gwyn Hughes Jones somehow underscores the American's selfish cowardice.
For all her diminutive stature, especially in his shadow, Mary Plazas makes a beguiling Butterfly, singing beautifully, if not quite powerfully enough, with Jean Rigby offering strong support as Suzuki. Plazas might have fared better with more passion from David Parry in the pit.
Despite the temptations of Parry's translation, as in: 'The world is my oyster, like any roving Yankee', Minghella resists the temptation to turn the piece into a modish anti-American tract. Thanks partly to the choreography of his associate director (and wife), Carolyn Choa, it comes across as scrupulously, cinematically Japanese. But the extra stage business, from ritual dances to dumb-shows, constantly diverts attention from the unfolding tragedy, leaving the eye dry as Butterfly makes a ritual end of herself.
It's not over, in this case, until the thin lady sings. As far as a packed Barbican was concerned, the American soprano Renee Fleming could have gone on singing for ever. As I left after two encores to her bravura recital of Purcell, Berg, Schumann, Previn and George Crumb, signs in the lobby proclaimed that she would soon be here to autograph her new CDs. How refreshing that, for once, they did not offer the same programme we'd just heard.
Fleming's recent recordings of Sacred Songs and Strauss's Daphne are a far cry from the ambitious, part-contemporary recital, which held a star-studded audience rapt. It was as if La Fleming, often maligned for her seizure of all commercial opportunities, was out to prove herself as a diva to be reckoned with, equally at home in contemporary and in classical repertoire.
After a shaky start, with her Purcell showing troubling signs of under-rehearsal, she revealed a soft spot for her fellow-American George Crumb (b. 1929), not least because he had written his 1979 song-cycle, Apparition, for her teacher, Jan DeGaetani.
Fleming then proceeded to deliver it with thrilling aplomb, sticking her elegant head beneath the lid of Hartmut Holl's amplified piano, and mouthing the final refrain from Walt Whitman. Crumb must be one of the few composers in history to have instructed his soloists NOT to sing.
Andre Previn's setting of Karen Blixen's The Giraffes Go to Hamburg, written for Fleming in 2000, also demonstrated her talent for conveying a song's poignant message, while lending it lyric beauty - almost, in this case, more than it deserves.
Her engagement with a piano transcription of Berg's Altenberglieder was also as intense as it was thrilling, leaving Schumann's love songs for his wife Clara as something of an anti-climax.
Yes, Renee was dressed in a florid Vivienne Westwood concoction, and specially fluffed up for the occasion; but Fleming detractors who missed this recital should think twice before dismissing her as merely a creature of Decca's marketing department.
Like those of Colin Davis, Bernard Haitink and Charles Mackerras, Pierre Boulez's 80th birthday celebrations seem to be going on forever. It is eight months since the actual event, seven since it was feted on the South Bank in a Bartok programme with Barenboim. The Barbican's party was all French, with Boulez's masterful conducting of the BBC Symphony in Debussy and his own Le soleil des eaux, suggesting that this birthday can last for years as far as his following is concerned.
There was only one sour note, as the second half lurched from the striking modernity of Debussy to the twee banality of Ravel's Daphnis and Chloe - all the simpering of Satie without the sinew of Stravinsky. But what do I know? This is but the latest instalment in the slew of 'reportage by unqualified experts', as Harrison Birtwistle characterised the current condition of music criticism, while supposedly presenting Boulez with an award.
Amid serial references to Iggy Pop, with whom he appears to be obsessed, Birtwistle then proclaimed his own cultural criteria by quoting with approval from The Da Vinci Code.
