Marty Sohl/Metropolitan Opera
Half an hour of intermission separates the first and second acts of Puccini’s“Madama Butterfly” at
the Metropolitan Opera. But in the libretto that gap covers three years
of suffering for the title character, a betrayed young geisha waiting
in vain for the return of her American husband.
The soprano Ana María Martínez,
appearing in her first leading role at the Met on Friday, made you
disbelieve your watch. Yes, you’d returned to your seat after just 30
minutes, but in that time years seemed to have gone by onstage. Ms.
Martínez’s Butterfly had transformed, in both manner and sound, from a
demure, besotted girl to a weary, hardened woman. She seemed, quite
simply, to have aged.
It
was a bit of theatrical magic in a beautiful performance: modest and
delicate, yet rising to glimpses of the epic in her final aria of
self-sacrifice. (She would do well to drop a single false note: a
cartoonish moment of pummeling Sharpless, the American consul, with her
fists.) While Ms. Martínez’s voice has a low, dark center of gravity
that makes the more conversational passages of the score really speak,
once she had settled into her upper register, her high notes came out
like Butterfly herself: reserved yet movingly clear.
Her
artful restraint was matched by those around her, including the
conductor Karel Mark Chichon, who made his company debut with a
performance that kept the drama flowing inexorably forward, cutting the
saccharine without stinting on Puccini’s lushness. Another new Met
artist, the baritone Artur Rucinski, sang Sharpless with an easy, mellow
tone, if also a blandness that made too little of this crucial,
conflicted character.
Roberto
De Biasio’s soft-focus tenor made the caddish Pinkerton a mild,
ineffectual presence. The mezzo-soprano Maria Zifchak, who reigns in New
York as Suzuki, Butterfly’s maid, was, as ever, dependably affecting in
Anthony Minghella’s vivid production, one of the triumphs of the Met’s
past decade.
But
it was Ms. Martínez’s evening. Now in her mid-40s, she has had an
active career, but not at the Met. She appeared as Micaela in a 2005 run
of “Carmen,” then disappeared until a few months ago, when she played
Musetta in “La Bohème.”
She
wasn’t originally scheduled for Butterfly, one of her signature roles,
but jumped into the first two performances — the second is on Monday
evening — as a replacement for the ill Met veteran Hei-Kyung Hong. It
would be wonderful to see Ms. Martínez on the company’s roster more
often.
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