Dec. 18, 2011
Palm Beach Opera offers intense, skillful handling of ‘Madama Butterfly’
“In the title role, soprano Maria Luigia Borsi handled her part with technical ease and utmost musicality, making for a compellingly delicate Cio-Cio-San.”
- by Màrcio Bezerra (Palm Beach Daily News)
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Dec. 17, 2011
PB Opera opens 50th season with beautiful ‘Butterfly’
“On Friday night at the Kravis Center, the Italian soprano Maria Luigia Borsi showed why she’s been acclaimed for her work as Cio-Cio San in other opera houses. She has a powerful, if not huge, voice, with an admirable technique that allowed her to have plenty of firepower when it came to the final pages. She sang well throughout this hugely demanding part, and... her work was accurate, smooth and compelling.
Her Un bel dì in Act II was lovely, with a careful, focused performance of the first bars that matched the orchestra almost as though she were in the pit with the musicians, and she unfolded her character’s dream-world conviction slowly, precisely and inexorably, ending with a firm grasp of the two final high B-flats. In the Act I love duet, she sang with warmth and tenderness, and when at times she sang about her happiness, she gave the world felice an endearing sweetness.
She proved to be a fine actress as well, working within the confines of director Ron Daniels’ very clear idea of what kind of story this is. Borsi is distinctly not a modern Butterfly who boldly makes her own choices, and her actions always were circumscribed by the tradition out of which a young girl in a rigid imperial society would act. By that I mean that her movements were boxed-in, but deliberately so, and her reading of the character had a sense of inevitable doom about it that added to its exoticism and made the East-West contrast, and the subsequent misunderstanding, more palpable.”
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-by Greg Stepanich (Palm Beach ArtsPaper)
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Dec. 22, 2011
Palm Beach Opera’s ‘Butterfly’ an enjoyable performance
“On Dec. 16, Italian soprano Maria Luigia Borsi gave a strong and well-sung performance, with nice touches such as an Un bel di that began almost as though she were another instrument of the orchestra, and built steadily from there. She acted well amid the confines of Ron Daniels’ stage vision, which had the cast operating in a tightly controlled environment that was distinctly redolent of traditional Japanese tropes of body movement and stylized gesture.”
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-by Greg Stepanich (The Palm Beach Post)
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Dec. 17, 2011
Palm Beach Opera opens 50th season with a worthy “Butterfly”
“As Cio-Cio San, the soprano Maria Luigia Borsi brought a creamy voice to the role, convincingly conveying her character’s transformation from love-struck girl to tragic heroine...
...Borsi’s plush middle range brought warmth to Butterfly’s expressions of maternal love and anguished yearning, with softly floating high notes when she sang about having to return to the life of a geisha to support her son, and it is these moments...that form the role’s emotional core.”
- by David Fleshler (South Florida Classical Review)
