Puccini staged in a time warp

{TABLE} Madama Butterfly ..... Puccini {/TABLE} IT'S an odd state of affairs. The Irish visit by the Moldovan National Opera company brought only a concert of operatic excerpts to Dublin but a touring production of Madama Butterfly to Clonmel.

The venue for the Clonmel performance was the Regal Theatre, which reopened in 1995, "restored and run without grant or funding", but obviously with lots of entrepreneurial spirit, by Larry and Helen O'Connor.

The Regal, which was built in 1929, can accommodate an audience of 850, placing it in size between the Theatre Royal in Wexford and the Cork Opera House. There is no pit, but the acoustic seemed lively and immediate. From a seat near the front of the balcony, the Regal offers a sonically up front experience of the kind opera goers have come to know and love in Wexford.

The Moldovan production of Butterfly, directed by Eugen Platon with sets and costumes by Viaceslav Okunev and Irina Press, was a time warping experience. The direction was static, with heavy reliance on stock gestures and fruity stand and deliver singing from the principals which brought to mind the style I encountered at the Gaiety around a quarter of a century ago.

The production is touring with multiple casts, and, I was reliably informed, the one heard in Clonmel did not include the best of the singers. Valentina Calestru was a mature if not quite matronly Butterfly and Nicolae Busuioc a brashly penetrating Pinkerton. There was a bit more depth to the Sharpless of Vladimir Dragos and the Suzuki of Tatian Busuioc.

The orchestral playing under Nicolai Dohotaru was fluent and alive, full of fascinating ethnic tinges (particularly from the wind an almost vibratoless first oboe and brass) which more than compensated for the many raw edges and roughnesses of ensemble.