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Richard Bratby

~ Classical music writer, critic and consultant

Richard Bratby

Tag Archives: Puccini

Review: Madam Butterfly (Welsh National Opera)

07 Friday Jul 2017

Posted by richardbratby in Uncategorized

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Birmingham Hippodrome, Puccini, Reviews, Welsh National Opera

wno_madam_butterfly_2017_cast_photo_credit_jeremy_abrahams

It really is that brown

 

The Birmingham Post isn’t always able to post online everything that I’ve written for its print edition, so – after a suitable time lag (ideally you should go out and buy the paper) – I’ll be posting my recent reviews here. As per the print edition, they’re all fairly concise – just 250 words. This is of a performance at Birmingham Hippodrome on Tuesday 27 June 2017.


Welsh National Opera has been doing some interesting things this year, but in the Second City it’s mostly been Puccini revivals. To say we’ve seen this all before is an understatement: Joachim Herz’s production of Madam Butterfly is nearly 40 years old, though to be fair Reinhart Zimmermann’s designs – with their hanging cherry blossom and little wood and paper house – have aged well. It’s only the tie-dye drapes and preponderance of the colour brown (it’s all very Habitat) that make you realise this production dates from 1978.

And of course each new cast, conductor and revival director (Sarah Crisp on this occasion) has the potential to breathe new life into it. The staging’s telling little details – Trouble’s toy lighthouse, the ugly locks that Pinkerton has fitted to the delicate-looking house in Act 2 – were matched by vivid, detailed performances: Rebecca Afonwy-Jones’s calm, compassionate Suzuki, and David Kempster, as a gruff, warm-toned Sharpless, wagging his finger in warning as he tries to make Pinkerton do the decent thing. As Pinkerton, Paul Charles Clarke was determinedly oafish. His hard-edged, blustery singing and the way he let the cowardice flash across his face won him a chorus of pantomime-baddie boos.

But of course there’s no Butterfly without Cio-Cio-San, and Linda Richardson had it all: unsinkable assurance shading into heart-breaking fragility and (at the end) chilling resolve, all conveyed in a voice that never stopped glowing – whether quiet and poised, or soaring above the orchestra at the climax of an Un Bel Di that really blazed. Andrew Greenwood conducted with red-blooded sweep, and the WNO Orchestra responded with a passion worthy of the only UK opera orchestra from which I’ve never heard a lacklustre performance.

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Review: English Touring Opera – La Boheme

15 Friday May 2015

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English Touring Opera, Puccini, Reviews

The Birmingham Post isn’t always able to post online everything that I’ve written for its print edition, so – after a suitable time lag (you should really go out and buy the paper!) – I’ll be posting my recent reviews here. As per the print edition, they’re all fairly concise – just 250 words. This is of a performance at Wolverhampton Grand Theatre on 13th April 2015.


1 Boheme
Could you love anyone who didn’t love La Bohème? Illica and Giacosa’s libretto sketches out the discomfort and poverty with deadpan precision. But once Puccini does his thing, who wouldn’t wish themselves in that freezing Parisian garret, losing their heart while the smoke of a thousand chimneys curls into the evening sky?

Yet Bohème is an opera that thrives on realism. And in James Conway’s new production for English Touring Opera, that’s what it gets, in a rough, bracing blast. There’s no watercolour sentimentality about Florence de Maré’s grungy, semi-abstract sets: a column of skulls stands macabre sentry over Act 4 and Act 1 is so dimly lit that the performers’ faces are sometimes barely visible.

But the strengths of this approach shone through in the interaction of the characters. There was a plausibly combative edge to the flatmates’ banter, and for all the sheen of his singing, David Butt Philip’s was a darker and more brusque Rodolfo than we’re used to seeing. Ilona Domnich matched him with a hesitant, nuanced Mimi; for once, you could spot the potential faultlines in their relationship.

They headed a cast in which there were no weak links; Grant Doyle was a likeably bluff Marcello, Sky Ingram an arresting Musetta with a vampish edge, and Njabulo Madlala and Matthew Stiff rounded out Schaunard and Colline engagingly. As always with ETO, lustrous singing came as standard, and under Michael Rosewell the orchestra made the score sound exuberantly fresh. Birmingham is fortunate to have opera of this quality so close at hand; if you haven’t yet made the short trip to see ETO, you’re missing something wonderful.

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