Butterfly finds its voice

As Sofia Coppola's film Lost in Translation suggested, Westerners find Japan contradictory and difficult to fathom. Most productions of Puccini's Madam Butterfly reduce the nation and its people to a prettified cluster of tea-set japonaiseries, but not Joachim Herz's staging for Welsh National Opera (WNO).

The production has its share of synchronised mincing and fantwitching, but it also has a clear-eyed vision of the piece that has kept it in the company's repertoire for a remarkable 25 years. It helps that Herz returned to Puccini's original two-act version, which is tougher on the Americans who so negligently wreck Butterfly's life.

That in turn focuses the drama even more closely on her, and WNO has done well to cast Nuccia Focile as Butterfly. She is a tiny figure, but her stage presence is immense, her every gesture made to tell.

Herz (or this revival's director, Robin Tebbutt) presents a highly detailed view of Butterfly that demands a genuine acting singer, and she is superb, defiantly proclaiming her misguided allegiance to America one moment, convulsing like a broken puppet the next.

Foccile's control of vocal nuance is hardly less complete, even if her voice develops something of a beat under pressure, so that her showpiece aria, Un bel di (One fine day), does not quite go for full value. Better that, though, than a soprano who manages the big sing but gives no sense of the moment-bymoment drama.

With Foccile, voice and body combine absolutely, so that her eventual suicide becomes, not a sop to audience sentimentality, but a real and wrenching sacrifice.

If none of the other singers quite matches her, Christopher Purves has the measure of Sharpless. His sonorous baritone is as rounded as his sense of the consul's flaws and compromises.

Stephen O'Mara lacks some of the high-impact ammunition for Pinkerton, but has ample energy to compensate, and all of them receive loving support from conductor Julian Smith, WNO's Head of Music.

The company only rarely comes to London; this show reminds us of what we have been missing.

Tomorrow, 7.30pm. Information: 0870 737 7737.

Madam Butterfly