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Atlanta Opera’s High Concept ‘Madama Butterfly’
OPERA REVIEW Puccini's "Madama Butterfly" Atlanta Opera. Saturday at Cobb Energy Performing Arts Centre. Repeats Oct. 7, 10 and 12. 404-881-8885, www.atlantaopera.org
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
It lasted just a moment, but oh what promise.
Cio-Cio-San made her entrance, rapturously, down a long curved ramp at the back of the stage. Her family entourage, dressed in colorful, modern-styled kimonos, formed a long hedge with umbrellas twirling. Circular rings painted on the floor evoked ripples in a Japanese garden pond. The brilliant twilight sky bled from fuchsias to deep reds.
Then Polish soprano Joanna Kozlowska, the tragic heroine of “Madama Butterfly,” sang of her impending marriage — a step in the joyous cycles of life and death — in gleaming tones at once steely, creamy and opulent, piercing through the orchestra, filling the room.
Opening Atlanta Opera’s 29th season Saturday at the Cobb Energy Performing Arts Centre, Kozlowska was the soprano to carry Puccini’s most fail-safe opera, with set and costume designs by Jun Kaneko, a celebrated Japanese-American sculptor and painter.
Kaneko’s production premiered in 2006 at Opera Omaha, in the sculptor’s adopted hometown, and has already been rented by several regional opera companies.
It’s the latest in a distinguished history of collaborations, where the most cross-pollinated of performing arts receives an injection of fresh insights or hip attitudes from comprehensive artists. Opera designs by Picasso (for Stravinsky) and David Hockney (for Mozart), for example, are still revived in the theater and are masterpieces in the realm of aesthetics-meets-function. (Kaneko’s designs for “Butterfly” are now on display at a SCAD-Atlanta gallery.)
Yet after the initial, giddy radiance of both Kozlowska’s voice and Kaneko’s visuals, neither offered enough to keep this “Butterfly” afloat.
In both cases, in fact, neither seemed to know what “Butterfly” was about. Primed to dominate the evening, they were at best uneven in appeal and substance.
Kozlowska has sung mostly at the major opera houses in Europe and reportedly hasn’t sung in the U.S. in a decade. Saturday night she blew her top-tier pipes but displayed paltry communication skills and static acting ability — either in physicality or, more crucially, in acting the role with her voice.
Puccini’s fragile Butterfly, the retired geisha, is all of 15 and marries for love B.F. Pinkerton, an American sailor. He’s in the arrangement for carnal purposes. She’s one of the composer’s few female creations whose character and maturity develops as the plot progresses.
Yet Kozlowska, a severe introvert on stage, never opened up, never gave us reason to sympathize. For “Un bel di” — singing of a hopeful tomorrow after three years abandoned — she rushed ahead of the orchestra and clipped her phrases and seemed to have no idea how to wring the juice from the opera’s greatest-hit aria.
There was much to admire in Kaneko’s designs, which played off traditional Japanese culture — including “shadow men” drawn from Bunraku theater — while effectively offering one artist’s unique vision. Too often, though, instead of complementing and augmenting the music and drama, his scenic elements distracted badly from the singing.
What was the message of the wavy red and blue computer graphics projected at the end of act one, during the big love duet? Pinkerton’s growing ardor? If so, it was too distracting, too obvious, a gimmick for showing us something that the music had already made palpable.
Thus strongest contributions came from the veterans.
Tenor Richard Leech, a leading Pinkerton in years past at New York’s Metropolitan Opera and also making his Atlanta Opera debut, sang with blocky phrasing and a pleasing, appropriately gruff “bite” in his tone that’s part of a warm embrace of a voice.
Conductor Joseph Rescigno didn’t so much impose an interpretation on the performance as step out of the way of the singers, breathing with them and keeping the orchestra tight.
The smaller roles were generally well cast. Weston Hurt was a vocally handsome Sharpless, the American consul. Jennifer Hines as a meek Suzuki, Butterfly’s servant. Joel Sorensen played a memorable Goro, the comic marriage broker, who seemed to have stepped out of some other, more stimulating production.
Sorensen’s sharp character acting revealed that Bernard Uzan, the stage director, didn’t ask for, or get, much from his cast — perhaps swamped, like the rest of us, by Kaneko’s concept.
Permalink | Comments (12) | Post your comment | Categories: Classical Music
Comments
By J. Vilanova
October 6, 2008 3:54 PM | Link to this
I pretty much agree. The point of my comment is to show that I have read the review. Please keep the art reviews coming. Thank you. J. Vilanova
By Ron Smith
October 7, 2008 3:27 AM | Link to this
Very thorough and accurate evaluation. As beautiful as the set, costume and lighting designs were, they seemed to distract from rather than support the story. The evaluations of the singers is also dead on. Thanks for the fair and even-handed review.
By John
October 7, 2008 3:06 PM | Link to this
Nice review! I look forward to seeing it this Friday (and hope they’ve resolved some of the timing issues). Opening night will always fall a tad short of a perfect performance.
By Brad As
October 7, 2008 8:08 PM | Link to this
So, what is better about this era of the Atlanta Opera than the William Fred Scott era. What happened to the hype about things being bigger and better? What’s holding them back now? What’s the new excuse?
By Brad As
October 7, 2008 8:11 PM | Link to this
So, what is better about this era of the Atlanta Opera than the William Fred Scott era. What happened to the hype about things being bigger and better? What’s holding them back now? What’s the new excuse?
By Peter Stelling
October 9, 2008 11:48 PM | Link to this
I was going to refrain from comment on this review, but the above blog asking “what is better now than in the William Fred Scott era” has forced me to comment. The new venue has everything to do with what is bigger and better about AO now than it was before. We have a great theatre in which we can properly evaluate voices and also actually hear the orchestra in the same room with us, not, as at Civic Center, sounding like they are out in the parking lot. That being said, I did find the modern Asian view of this late 19th c. classic somewhat disappointing…and here’s my MAIN reason for saying so: I am old enough to have seen classic productions of this romantic warhorse. I can remember the gorgeous, realistic sets the MET brought to the FOX in 1958, with a real garden, a real house with shoji screens overlooking a real Nagasaki Harbor, and cherry trees that magically began to weep blossoms over the mismatched lovers in the rapturous and tragic love scene at the close of Act One. All that magic is lost in an overwhelming blast of enormous etch-a-sketch screens, bouncing up and down over the heads of dwarfed singers in the current production. I could remember what I saw 50 years ago and dismiss the failure of this production to live up to it. But what about new audience who have never seen or heard this opera before? They are left with a totally incomplete impression of one of opera’s classics. It may just drive new audience away in droves to cave to this kind of modernistic reinterpretation. That is my fear for opera in general world-wide (this sort of thing started in Germany and is taking over everywhere), not just for Atlanta Opera. Beware reinventing the classics. If the visual magic is lost, opera has lost one of its most important elements.
By Scholar
October 11, 2008 9:52 AM | Link to this
Friday’s performance of Butterfly was on balance an exquisite evening when most of the elements fell into place in grand style. The singing and orchestra teamed up to elevate the production above two very distractions. Kozlowska’s acting simply destroyed her Butterfly. She handled the music but it was hard to tell because her acting was so wooden and stiff and unnatural.
Second, also attributed to her poor acting was her mauling of the child. Both she and Suzuki dragged him around the stage physically forcing him to kneel. What could have created such sympathy for him, the ultimate victim of the characters’ narcissim, deceit, and bad choices, in real life her embraces would scar a child emotionally forever. That said, this Butterfly serves as a reminder of the company’s ability to deliver an enjoyable show and its steady growth toward greatness.
By Seth Pajak
October 11, 2008 1:38 PM | Link to this
I just saw the Oct. 10th performance. I am 36 years old and this was my fourth opera performance. My first was Madame Butterfly in the Civic Center. It was far better than this one. The folks with more opera experience than I can lay out the details but again I think the Butterfly performance at the Civic Center was much better than this one. Last year I saw Turendot and that was fantastic so I know that the new changes in th AO can work I just think that what happened with this year’s Butterfly was a swing and a miss.
By Princess
October 11, 2008 5:33 PM | Link to this
We saw opening night of Butterfly and felt it was the worst opera we have seen AO perform. If it had not been for the lovely Puccini score and the orchestra our night would have been a complete waste. The costumes and sets were such a total disappointment and we feel cheated!! What was up with the tacky butterfly alis party hat stuck on poor Butterfly’s head in the opening scene? Oh for a night at the Met!!
By Princess
October 11, 2008 5:34 PM | Link to this
We saw opening night of Butterfly and felt it was the worst opera we have seen AO perform. If it had not been for the lovely Puccini score and the orchestra our night would have been a complete waste. The costumes and sets were such a total disappointment and we feel cheated!! What was up with the tacky butterfly alis party hat stuck on poor Butterfly’s head in the opening scene? Oh for a night at the Met!!
By Carol
October 11, 2008 9:25 PM | Link to this
Because Cobb Energy Center is practically in our backyard, my husband and I were willing to attempt broadening our horizons, and went to Turendot last year. We so enjoyed it, we were eager to see a classic, Madame Butterfly, and attended Friday night’s performance. We did not know in advance that it would be a minimalist, non-traditional performance. From the moment we entered the auditorium and saw the strange, unappealing array of kimonos grouped on the stage curtain, the production had the feel of a highschool program, a feeling only enhanced by the hideous, bare stage set revealed when the curtain rose. The costumes were cartoonish and off-putting. The movable screen on the round dias seemed to possess no purpose beyond giving the servant, Suzuki, some action to perform on stage. The screens that dropped from the ceiling likewise felt contrived. If not for the beautiful music, we would have been utterly disappointed in our experience. I fully appreciate that we are not officianados by any means, but I suspect average folk such as ourselves did not enjoy this operatic production.
By Joy
October 17, 2008 10:47 AM | Link to this
You nailed it!
I saw my first “Madam Butterfly” at the Fox Theater in St. Louis, MO ,alone, at age nine. As a budding pianist, I was blown away by the story, the music and the costumes. The production I witnessed Sunday afternoon was “stark”!
I thought the set was stark, the costumes were stark, and the passion was nowhere to be heard or seen. It was a great disappointment. When Butterfly came on stage with a huge butterfly in her hair and looking very matronly, I knew we were in trouble. Where was Pinkerton’s white naval uniform? He was dressed in a very Japanese costume, thanks to Jun Kaneko, but given Pinkerton’s strong American leanings, it was just incredulous! If that’s fresh insight, let’s go with hindsight.
Joel Sorenson’s Goro was both believable and entertaining. Weston Hurt was also good as was Jennifer Hines.
Richard Leech lacked passion and precision. Joanna Kozlowska was pathetically miscast, no emotion there. Even the flower petals had no color. An underwhelming production.
I saw Turandot last year and it was just fantastic. What happened. It’s like the emperor has no clothes and no one wants to tell him so. Let’s hope for next time.