My new favourite Puccini opera

Indirectly, Madama Butterfly was the opera which introduced me to opera. In 2003 it was to be my first ever real experience of live opera. I was not a fanatic at the time. It was in preparing for that production, with a nice Decca Puccini compilation, that I became one. But Butterfly itself was sort of incidental; the music made no great impression on me, Cio-Cio San didn't appeal, and I moved on and have never felt very tempted to return to it.

However, things change. Or rather, divas change them. I fooled you with the first paragraph; this is, in fact, pretty much another post about Cheryl Barker. Cheryl, who has filled the last few weeks with more Puccini than I'd had in the whole lifetime preceding them. Cheryl, who is such perfection in Puccini that I thrill to it as to Mozart or Handel. Cheryl, who has brought me back, in glorious fashion, to Madama Butterfly.

She's filmed it twice. Once in Robert Wilson blue, once in pretty pinks and reds for Opera Australia. I bought the latter and it's a revelation. I love the music. It fascinates me as much as La bohème bores me. Inspired, perhaps, by the exotic setting and highly charged plot, Puccini seems to create a far more multicoloured, expressive and evocative sound world in Japan than he did in Paris. Where La bohème plods, Butterfly enchants. At least it does me. That's helped by Moffatt Oxenbould's simple and beautiful production, one of the prettiest I've seen emerge from Opera Australia.

And I've had my preconceptions of Cio-Cio San smashed to smithereens. I've thought of her as irritatingly fragile, a boring, blank naive victim. Cheryl is none of those things. Her Cio-Cio San is bright and passionate, with a vivid sense of humour. Innocent, yes, but not an idiot. She's thought about life, made a decision and stuck with it. Most strikingly of all, she is, until everything falls apart, genuinely happy. When she smiles, she's not pathetic — you don't pity her, you just smile along with her, because her joy is infectious. Even her suicide, while devastating, is somehow a positive decision; neither that action, nor the woman herself, can be dismissed as Tragic Heroine and nothing more because whatever she is, she isn't tragic.

How much of this is down to Cheryl and how much to the character as written, I'm not sure. There was surprises for me in the libretto. Butterfly's resistance to Yamadori, for instance, is full of wit and humour, which I hadn't realised; I just expected virtuous vows of fidelity and childish obstinance. The unmistakeable Cheryl Barker Touch plays its part too, though, a special talent for intensity without cliché; she's thoroughly, thrillingly operatic without ever resorting to stock gestures or vocal tricks. Even "Un bel di" seems less of a warhorse in her care; she sings it simply and believably, to herself and to Suzuki, not as a party piece for the audience, all distant gazes and sweeping gestures. She's in outrageously good voice throughout, scaling the heights with glossy ease and fifty million expressive colours.

Pinkerton, by the way, isn't a revelation. He's a bastard. There are plenty of reviews which mention "unusually sympathetic" Pinkertons, but Jay Hunter Morris isn't one of them. Which is fine. True, he's convincingly remorseful in the final act but it isn't really enough to make up for what came before, nor is he three dimensional enough to care much about either way. Nicely sung for the most part, if a bit on the brutal side. Douglas McNicol's Sharpless is the Nicer American and a genuinely interesting character. Best of all (apart from Butterfly herself, obviously) is Ingrid Silvaeus' engaging and richly sung Suzuki, making the mother of all thankless mezzo roles seem in fact rather rewarding.

The question now is, is it Butterfly the character I've fallen for, or Butterfly the opera? Will my newfound affection endure with a different soprano in the role? I'm actually pretty sure it will. There was so much to love in this film, and while a lot of it was Cheryl based, a lot wasn't. I'll be testing the theory shortly; I've also bought a copy of Karajan's Butterfly on Decca, featuring my adored Mirella Freni and an all star cast. It's all looking rosy.