Madama Butterfly (Saint-Petersburg Opera Theatre, opera)

The performance is the winner of The Golden spotlights, the highest St. Petersburg drama award in the 2005-2006 season as Best Musical Drama Performance. "Madama Butterfly" has been on the playbill of the world opera houses for more than a hundred years. Among other outstanding performances of the opera, the one offered by The St. Petersburg Chamber Opera has become one of the most extraordinary versions of the brilliant score by Puccini. The performance is skillfully built and thoroughly designed. Instead of external effects and pseudo-Oriental exoticism, it strikes the audience with its bright passion, personal touch, and psychological depth. "I would never stage "Cio-Cio-San" unless this story touched me so deeply, tearing me apart so painfully. It is like an abscess in my soul that constantly hurts, burns and is felt in every cell of my body. Human pain has no time or historical boundaries, neither does it depend on your nationality or social environment. The English version of Lucretia’s tragic love story, the French Traviata and the Japanese Butterfly are all united for me with this suffering and despair of a Woman. Our play is set in the post-war Japan, after the horrific bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I intentionally put the characters into a more cruel time, trying to remove any decorativeness, using minimum scenery or props. The scene is as naked as the people who lived in those impoverished, hungry times. There is nothing that would distract you. Only the humans in their fatal loneliness and all-consuming Pain. I see Pinkerton’s love for Butterfly as something resembling a humanitarian aid from America. The nature of these relations is monstrous. In the end, the moral explosion turns out to be stronger and worse than the nuclear explosions in Hiroshima and Nagasaki", says Yuri Alexandrov.