Anthony Minghella’s debut operatic production, Madam Butterfly, has returned to English National Opera for Puccini’s 150th anniversary year. Not that you would know it: Puccini is so perenially present that the celebrations will scarcely show. But this production has never been backward in coming forward and, with a new Cio-Cio-San at its heart, it remains in its second revival as seductive and perplexing as the opera itself.

Judith Howarth is a Butterfly worth waiting for. We hear and see all too little of her in London; but hers is one of the most intelligent and moving sopranos in the land. Her physique and presence are still credibly teenage (poor little Butterfly is, after all, only 15); yet, from herfirst entry, there is a seriousness, a dignity and a sense of calm superiority about her that makes her descent into obsessive self-delusion at the hands of Puccini all the more horrifying.

When she sings of the spirits of her ancestors, in the lustrous lower registers of her voice, a deep abyss of time and wisdom opens up and a heart of darkness is revealed. What’s more, you never have to glance up at the surtitles to check her words.

Hers is the world of Michael Levine’s stunning raked mirror-scapes; of the Blind Summit Theatre’s skilled bunraku Japanese puppetry; of the green light of sea and sky, of the cherry-blossom curtain, and the dance of the origami robins. Minghella’s production is choreographed and rehearsed by his wife, Carolyn Choa, and whether you find the ever-turning kaleidoscope of virtuoso visual invention mesmeric or simply distracting will be an entirely personal matter.

If you know the opera well, Han Feng’s outrageously beautiful costumes and the multidimensional mirror/shadow play will not distract from this cast’s strong performances. If you are new to it, then it might well detract from the more subtle reactions and responses of Karen Cargill’s steadily sung, all-seeing, all-knowing Suzuki, or from the anguished doubts of Ashley Holland’s somewhat undercharacterised Sharpless.

Gwyn Hughes Jones, every bit the shiny-faced Midwest farmer’s boy made good, is in confident and eloquent voice as Pinkerton and his final remorse is almost convincing. Two ENO Young Singers make an impressive showing: William Berger as a resonant kabuki Prince Yamadori, and Madeleine Shaw as the maddeningly unwitting cause of all Butterfly’s misfortune, Kate Pinkerton.

The puppetry remains a problem. While the mind is constantly wrestling with the question “why?” and trying to make its own arguments for and against the transplanting of random, stylised elements of bunraku theatre into the realism of Puccini’s verismo, the ear might just miss the hidden detail of the score, briskly, leanly, and always lovingly conducted by David Parry.

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