Opera Night

{TABLE} Madama Butterfly ............... Puccini {/TABLE} LAST night's performance of Madama Butterfly, at the Bank of Ireland RTE Proms in the RDS Main Hall, had a rather frustrating mix of good and bad points. This opera is almost ideal for simple staging and Anne Makower's production worked well, except for the lack of variety in the lighting.

Almost all the singers were Irish, and the principals Michie Nakamaru (title role), Bridget Knowles (Suzuki), Ronan Tynan (Pinkerton), Damian Smith (Sharpless) and James Drummond Nelson(Goro) were reliable throughout. Nakamaru stood out, however, in her greater experience, in her subtle expression and in her easy command of the parlando style which dominates so much of the opera. As far as the big arias went, she was in a class of her own.

This could be appreciated even against the uniformity imposed by the amplification, which was often intrusive and was prone to infuriating changes of level. The acoustics of the RDS Main Hall are not good but such close miked and distorting amplification merely substitutes one set of problems for another, which are in many ways worse. It irons out the individuality of voices (soloists wore radio mikes) and delivers far too much noise from breathing and from instrumental mechanisms. Worst of all, we lose that central feature of Puccini's expressive world the way the voices ride on the back of rich orchestral sound and have to compete with it.

The result was not just unbalanced it was far less personal than it could have been, even though an absence of amplification would almost certainly require the audience to concentrate hard at first. This was a pity, for conductor Proinnsias O Duinn paced the performance well and the RTE Concert Orchestra delivered some warm hearted and shapely playing.