YOUNG MI KIM AS CIO-CIO SAN

Giacomo Puccini’s Japanese heroine, Madama Butterfly, completely dominates the opera that bears her name, both musically and dramatically. There have been sopranos who manage to turn the role into a musical tour de force, but few bother to make more than gestures toward the drama.

Young Mi Kim, a young Korean soprano who has sung Butterfly in Houston, took over for Leona Mitchell Saturday night at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion and shaped the opera into a dramatic unity, blending her phrases and looks into a telling, tragic portrait. If her singing, in the Music Center Opera production, seemed at times rough-hewn and edgy, many of those moments served the theatrical thrust of the work well.

More superb singing of “Un bel di” has perhaps been rendered before. But not many performances of the aria--or of the role--have been made to tell us as much as Kim managed to do with her poignant, playful and finally pitiful Butterfly.