Review: Madame Butterfly at Auckland Town Hall

The triumph of the Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra's 2008 Salome is a tough act to follow and, yes, perhaps the orchestra might have been a mite more adventurous with this year's Opera in Concert.

Yet a capacity town hall audience on Friday suggested that Madame Butterfly was just what Aucklanders wanted, and it certainly reminded us of Puccini's exquisite and too-often-overlooked musical genius.

One could not have wished for a more affecting Cio-Cio-San than Svetlana Katchour. Her entrance took the breath away.

When the time came for "Un bel di vedremo", it was a baring of the soul, and the Russian soprano was deft in ensemble work.

Bantering about nesting robins with Jared Holt's keenly drawn Sharpless earned a ripple of laughter from the audience; her later exchanges with Anna Pierard's superbly sung Suzuki brought home the sense of impending tragedy.

Such was the force of Katchour's performance, we could almost excuse her awkward tending to a non-existent child at various points in the evening - and the young son's absence inevitably undercut the dramatic impact of the opera's final pages.

She sang without a score, while the other cast members were score-bound to varying degrees.

This certainly detracted a little from Patrick Power's psychologically insightful and magnificently sung Pinkerton - alongside him, Richard Greager was quite happy to put book aside if a wily point needed to be made.

Minor roles were well handled, even if the orchestra covered a passing phrase or three.

Although the Humming Chorus might not have been the transcendent experience it can be, the Chapman Tripp Opera Chorus was generally in good voice.

Throughout, conductor Eckehard Stier took Puccini every bit as seriously and thoroughly as he did Richard Strauss a year ago.

Puccini dispenses orchestral colours by the bucketful, and the APO held nothing back, from fugal scurryings to cloudbursts of emotion.

But was Madame Butterfly really the right choice?

Perhaps, although it could have been incontestable if the APO had chosen the rarely heard original 1904 score.