OPERA REVIEW : Seattle Reheats ‘Madama Butterfly’

The Seattle Opera has attracted considerable attention in recent years for thinking big and for thinking different.

It was here that America saw its first futuristic “Ring des Nibelungen.” Local audiences have long taken Janacek and Berg in stride. Just a few weeks ago, Speight Jenkins, the imaginative general director, mustered what may have been the first performance anywhere of Massenet’s alternate version of “Werther”--the quirky one in which the title role is assigned to a baritone.

No company, however, can survive on novelty and adventure alone. Even Seattle cooks with water on occasion. This week it is cooking Puccini.

“Madama Butterfly” has been packing the 3,000-seat Opera House for an unprecedented eight-performance run. The weepy audiences are happy. The box-office treasurer is happy. Nevertheless, one doesn’t have to be a critical “Butterfly” collector to recognize certain basic problems.

Richard Bradshaw conducts with a cool head and a brisk hand. He favors restraint even when approaching the greatest gushes of Italianate rhetoric. Although one can admire his taste, one must acknowledge that it does little here to further the cause of poignancy.

Ken Cazan’s staging scheme frequently bogs down in fussy bits of extraneous business. He comes up with interesting ideas--some even look original--but many are trivial pursuits that merely distort the expressive focus.

Carey Wong’s panoramic set--borrowed from Eugene, Ore.--turns the playing area into an obstacle course, and not a gainly one at that. A daunting flight of steps leads to a quaint little bridge that spans rocky chasms high above Cio-Cio-San’s house. Getting to the center of the action is not easy for the participants, and it certainly can’t be half the fun.

The title role was once relatively easy to cast. Remember the golden days of Albanese and Kirsten, Roman and Steber, Tebaldi and Callas, Jurinac and De los Angeles, Stella and Price . . . ? Those days seem, alas, to be over.

Barbara Daniels--the latest would-be heir to the ex-geisha’s kimono, dagger and hum-along aria--used to be an adorable soubrette. Now, with both her voice and body gaining some weight, she wants to be a spinto diva.

The program magazine tells us that she is about to venture the suicidal stresses of La Gioconda, on location in Venice. It gives one pause.

She sings Puccini with reasonable amplitude and verbal point. She is an intelligent, communicative artist.

She minimizes the mincing rituals of mock- japonaiserie . She commands attention with simple devices of operatic pathos, deftly applied.

However, it took her a long time to warm up on Wednesday. Her top tones, which used to be notable for their silvery sheen, emerged blunt and tough. She didn’t even bother to reach for the optional D-flat in the entrance episode. Nor was she very generous when it came to caressing the line in moments of introspection. There was more shade here than light.

Marcello Giordani--her ardent, 26-year-old Pinkerton from Sicily--introduced the contradiction of an amiable, robust persona and a slender, delicate tenor. His warm, brightly focused, lyric resources might be better suited to bel-canto than verismo, but his is obviously a major talent. Remember the name.

The supporting cast included Gaetan Laperriere as a nondescript Sharpless, Kathryn Garber as a sweet little Suzuki, Steven Cole as a particularly busy, unusually sinister Goro and Ralph Wells as an oddly Chaplinesque Yamadori.

At the end, Puccini triumphed against the odds. He always does, no matter how tepid the performance.

Seattle is using him, not incidentally, to help subsidize six ambitious performances of “Die Meistersinger” this August and six of Poulenc’s “Dialogues des Carmelites” next January. It is a productive quid pro quo.