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Music Out Now

Angela Gheorghiu - Puccini’s Madama Butterfly

High summer in Rome, July 2008, and a prestigious cast of musicians is assembled for a momentous occasion – to record Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, 150 years after the composer’s birth. It’s momentous for several reasons: firstly, because we live in an age when studio recordings of operas are, sadly, all too rare.

Secondly, because the last EMI recording of Butterfly took place 43 years ago in 1966, also in Rome, conducted by Sir John Barbirolli and with a cast including Renata Scotto as Cio-Cio-San and Carlo Bergonzi as Pinkerton – still a benchmark today.

And thirdly because the current cast is a genuine dream team: Antonio Pappano, opera conductor par excellence, Jonas Kaufmann, the most exciting young lyric tenor to emerge in recent times, and, of course, Angela Gheorghiu, one of the greatest and most magnetic opera stars of our era. When elements like these combine, it is bound to result in the most important and anticipated new release of the decade.

This project is the 10th opera recording for the fruitful Antonio Pappano–EMI partnership, and Angela Gheorghiu’s 9th with the label (these have included, with Pappano, the highly acclaimed Manon and peerless La rondine – the latter with her tenor husband Robert Alagna). Butterfly is a huge project for the Romanian soprano, who shot to fame in a sensational Covent Garden production of La traviata in 1994.

She is famously known for her dark, expressive lirico-spinto soprano, a sound ideal for Puccini. And Puccini has always been ‘the one’ for Gheorghiu. ‘If Puccini were alive today, I’d be in love with him, I know it,’ she has said. And Butterfly – Cio-Cio-San – is the ultimate Puccini role.

The opera’s well-known story maps a clash of cultures, the most tragic misunderstanding. An American sailor stationed in Nagasaki at the turn of the 20th century amuses himself with a temporary ‘marriage’ to a 15-year-old local girl. She, however, falls deeply in love, even giving up her religion and family for him.

After a couple of months he sails away, leaving her pregnant. She bears his child and spends the next three years waiting patiently for him to come back to her. But the sailor has married a ‘real’ American wife and when he returns to Nagasaki to claim his son, the girl kills herself.