Ah, the Metropolitan opened with Butterfly on Tuesday. A new season with Mr. Gelb at the helm. He promises to bring the opera to us in new ways. Fine, as long as the music and production values are not compromised. So, BRAVO! BRAVA! and welcome another brilliant season.


The FT may have a more realistic view. "The brouhaha was spectacular. Manhattan was agog with excitement. On Monday, Peter Gelb, hitherto best known as a record-company executive, took over as head honcho at the mighty Met. He chose not to tread lightly.
To inaugurate his regime, he imported Anthony Minghella’s quasi-cinematic, stubbornly decorative production of Madama Butterfly from the English National Opera. That achievement per se should have moved relatively little earth. Gelb persuaded conservative New Yorkers, however, that he had engineered a coup akin to the second coming of Puccini.

He turned the dress rehearsal into an open house, admission free. He beamed the inaugural gala to massive television screens erected on the Lincoln Center plaza out front and at distant Times Square. Before the downbeat and during two extended intervals, he offered breathless interviews with gushing celebrities in attendance, informal fashion shows, architectural panoramas, rehearsal sequences, conversations with artists and ceremonies honouring millionaire donors. The impresario also transmitted the performance, the first of many, to subscribers via satellite radio. Obviously, a populist revolution had begun.

Under the circumstances, Butterfly seemed an appropriate vehicle. It abounds, after all, in hum-along melody while it deals in simple pathos. It is, we had thought, a virtually foolproof tear-jerker. On this occasion, however, it jerked few tears. Minghella’s cool and calculating interpretation, reinforced by Michael Levine and Han Feng (designers), Carolyn Choa (choreographer) and Peter Mumford (lighting), values pretty pictures as it dabbles in modernism – high-mirror vistas, fan-dance divertissements, static tableaux, irrelevant flashbacks and flashforwards, balletic distractions and stagey abstractions.

The result looks undeniably clever and endlessly artsy. Unfortunately, Minghella blurs many a narrative turn and seems embarrassed by the composer’s unabashed emotionalism.

Central to the alienation is a bizarre bit of stylisation. Butterfly’s little son, aptly named Trouble, is portrayed here not by a flesh-and-blood actor but by a Bunraku puppet. One has to admire the inherent virtuosity. One has to deplore the inherent gimmicky. Abandoned by her ugly- American husband, Cio-Cio-San commits suicide when asked to part with her adored child. If the object of her desperation is a wooden dummy, her ultimate sacrifice seems a bit silly.

Minghella’s essentially cerebral concept found a jolting contradiction in the pit, where James Levine enforced unusually slow movement and surprisingly sentimental accents. This, not incidentally, was the first Butterfly of his 35-year tenure at the Met; also his only Butterfly of the season. Puccini may not be Levine’s forte.
The uneven cast was led by Cristina Gallardo-Domâs, a heroine whose timidity emerged chronically droopy and whose vocalism vacillated between sensitive introspection and climactic strain. Marcello Giordani partnered her as a ceaselessly plangent, properly dashing Pinkerton. Like most Suzukis, Maria Zifchak capitalised on supportive restraint. Dwayne Croft exuded sympathy as Sharpless but sounded threadbare. Although strangely attired like the Mikado, Greg Fedderly managed to avoid caricature as Goro. Ultimately, poor Butterfly got lost amid the ballyhoo. From the 26 October, FINANCIAL TIMES