Living at the Opera

Many sopranos, regardless of their vocal catagory, have yearned to include Puccini’s Madama Butterfly into their repertoire and unfortunately the annals are filled with stories of their unsuccessful attempts. But that was not the case with the Arizona Opera Company which had the good fortune of presenting two sopranos, Indira Mahajan and Barbara Divis in the role of Butterfly who easily met the numerous vocal and dramatic challenges Puccini so passionately delineated for his beloved tragic heroine. These two portrayals, however, were only part of what made this Butterfly production surely one of the best examples of how regional opera is capable of rivaling any international opera company’s presentation of a Puccini work. To be honest, along with Mahajan and Divis, conductor Antony Walker and director Colin Graham were unknowns to audiences here in Tucson, aided little by the sketchy bios in the program. But with five successful performances in Phoenix and three in Tucson, at the end of January and the beginning of February, they will now be remembered for their moving collaborative undertaking of Puccini’s most intimate work.

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