May is a Puccini month at London's two opera houses, and the rival offerings almost caricature their contrasting traditions. Covent Garden is showcasing celebrity singers and a rightly neglected lightweight work, La Rondine.
The Coliseum, reviving Graham Vick's warhorse production of Madam Butterfly for the 11th time in 18 years, offers ensemble virtues and a challenging, if misguided, view of the composer's masterpiece. In terms of operatic impact, there is no contest.
Vick puts Pinkerton, the American naval officer, and his exploitative selfishness at the centre of the drama in place of the misused Cio-Cio-San's tragic naivete. In Ian Rutherford's revival, there is never the slightest doubt that the whole thing will end in tears from the moment the lieutenant struts on to the stage. This owes much to Alan Opie's well acted and wisely sung Sharpless, who focuses the tragedy in human terms, and to an edition of the opera by Vick and John Mauceri, which emphasises all Pinkerton's unattractive qualities while denying him the big moment of self-reproach that Puccini later inserted near the end of the opera.
The production gets messy in the second half, partly because the designs by Stephanos Lazaridis confine so much of the action into too small a part of the stage, and partly because Vick's view of the work aims to deny Butterfly her centrality - perverse when she, not Pinkerton, is on stage almost throughout. Moments that Puccini undoubtedly intended as the big dramatic climaxes therefore don't quite come off as they should.
But the final tableau, with Pinkerton sweeping his child up into his arms, is as chilling as Puccini's violent discords that accompany it.
The two central principals reinforce this fascinating but slightly wrongheaded view of the opera. Julia Melinek acts sympathetically, but vocally she is not a conventional Butterfly. She has ringing top notes, but there is not enough support in the middle of the voice to exploit the eloquence that Puccini lavishes on his heroine.
Bonaventura Bottone, by contrast, has an unrelentingly big tone, dominating the love duet and the ensembles, leaving Pinkerton little room for pathos or contrast. Christine Rice sings a thoroughly admirable Suzuki, and Victoria Simmonds and Mark Richardson caught the attention as Kate Pinkerton and the Bonze.
· In rep until June 13. Box office: 020-7632 8300.
