When we come to questions of performance itself, we meet with my second fundamental problem with the presentation, which is the very nature of much contemporary musical/vocal interpretation. When, as here, this kind of performance is executed at a high level, it meets with general approbation because it checks all the text-verifiable, authenticity-presumptive boxes while unchecking those derived from oral tradition and individual imagination or instinct. In Opera as Opera, I use the term “Notperformance” (as distinct from an incompetent or slovenly one) for this sort of rendering. Because it is at a high skill level, receptors can’t really find anything or anyone to blame; yet it does not consummate the piece at hand, or at best fulfills some of its aesthetic content while leaving its dramatic and emotional potential unrealized. This last applies here. Riccardo Chailly draws consistently sensuous and impressive sounds from his excellent La Scala orchestra. We can bask in them, never more so than in the Act 2 interlude. That’s certainly a primary pleasure ingredient in Puccinian cookery. With regard to tempos, I could say that Chailly sustains slow ones well—sections that can droop or wallow don’t—and tends to take faster ones a little quickly for my taste. But when it comes to pace as an element of musicodramatic (i. e., operatic) realization, the tempo proportions per se are not the crucial point. The crucial point is the degree to which (on the broader level) the dramatically definable episodes in the music are recognized, and their characteristics and events strongly enough delineated to land; and then, on the more specific, moment-to-moment level within each episode, the degree to which conductor and singers (and—not incidentally—the director) have worked together to find the phrasings, shadings, timings that will bring the story most continually and vividly to life. This is particularly determinative in writing that, like Puccini’s, seeks to enclose its episodes in long, through-composed arcs.

For me, Chailly disappoints on both these levels (my notes read “rushing along,” “just pushing through,” and, betimes, “flattening the curves”), but most keenly on the second, since there so much depends on the oral and imaginative sources of “effect” and “style.” There is really no evidence of any interpretive collaboration among conductor and singers (let alone the director) beyond reproducing what’s on the page; this Butterfly is just a very accomplished recitation.

As I said earlier, all this is for me an underlying problem with most operatic interpretation today. If you like this type of performance—clean, well executed, note-accurate, true to the surface meaning of the text though not to many of its implications—it may satisfy you. Its deficiencies cannot all be laid at the doorsteps of conductors and directors. While in any given instance we can hear and see that the performers’ creativity is under severe restraint from above, we must in fairness ask what they would bring to the table if not so restrained. We’ll never have an answer without serious re-thinking about the cultural and vocal education of young artists, and changes in our rehearsal and production habits. I know that you’ve heard that from me, in one formulation or another, many times before. That is because no matter which direction the signs point, and no matter what the billboards promise along the way, in the end the paths bring us back to the same crossroads.