By my reckoning, Opera North has mounted four, possibly five, productions of Puccini’s ever-popular Madama Butterfly since it was founded in 1979. These include a staging of the original version – a musically different opera from the one most of us know today – that proved such a flop at La Scala, Milan, in 1904. Although the public cleaves to the revisions Puccini made over the next two years to produce a “standard” text, modern directors have come to prefer elements of the harder-edged, more overtly antiAmerican original, alleging that Puccini watered down the drama and softened the character of the caddish Lt Pinkerton, giving him a romantic aria of remorse to massage the egos of star tenors reluctant to play the love rat.

That particular ploy of Puccini’s hasn’t worked. Star tenors still shy away, and who can blame them when sections of the public, in the UK at least, have taken to booing unsympathetic characters like villains in a pantomime? Pinkerton and his American wife, Kate, are the McCanns of opera, it seems.

In Leeds, I’m glad to report, the intelligent Opera North audience doesn’t behave like that – largely, I suspect, because Tim Albery has directed an unusually balanced and thoughtful staging of this operatic potboiler. True, like most recent directors, he sees Madama Butterfly – and, by association, Japanese culture – as a victim of American-style commercialisation.

His updating to the postwar 1940s is framed by episodes from a modern, Americanised, Japan in which the ancient geisha tradition is transformed into blatant sex for sale. During the overtures, a traditional geisha strikes poses while wannabes of both sexes make themselves up in front of dressing-room mirrors.

Traditionalists might, I suppose, find such glosses tendentious, but Albery avoids turning Madama Butterfly into an antiAmerican rant. His staging, in Hildegard Bechtler’s beautiful, contemporary Japanese-chic set, against a traditional backdrop of Mount Fuji, is evenhanded. Pinkerton’s ultra-American brashness and insensitivity has its counterweight in the respectful obeisance Consul Sharpless pays to Japanese customs and the obvious discomfort he feels at the cynicism of the 999-year marriage contract, and lease on the paper house, that can be broken by the husband at a month’s notice. When Sharpless makes his second visit to Butterfly with Pinkerton’s letter, he is wearing a Japanese robe, and he takes his shoes off before entering the house, while the thoroughly Americanised Cio-Cio-San puts hers on.

Three years on, this Butterfly has adopted the bobbed hair and sartorial manner of one of Hollywood’s sex icons, the silent movie diva Louise Brooks, Lulu in the classic film version of Wedekind’s Pandora’s Box. In this way, Albery undercuts Puccini's soft-centred presentation of his heroine, but without undermining her moral authority and tragic pathos. As played and sung by the diminutive Anne-Sophie Duprels, this Butterfly is no wide-eyed fantasist, but a realist with a sense of destiny and familial honour. She can contemplate returning to work as a geisha, but not to a marriage of convenience with a rich man. She chooses suicide rather than the shame of abandoning her beloved child to strangers.

Even though the role occasionally stretches her voice to its limits, and beyond, Duprels throws body and soul into her music, and brings heartbreaking physical fragility and dignity to the doomed geisha. Opera North surrounds her with a decent supporting cast, although Rafael Rojas’s paunchy, middle-aged Pinkerton, deprived of his redeeming aria, seems no more of a catch than Paul Gibson’s desiccated Prince Yamadori. If Pinkerton doesn’t have the excuses of being young, immature and drop-dead gorgeous, he is a monster, which surely wasn’t Puccini’s intention. Peter Savidge’s sensitive Sharpless, Ann Taylor’s fiercely protective Suzuki and Alasdair Elliott’s toad-like Goro make strong impressions as actors, but among the smaller roles, only the starrily cast Kate Pinkerton of Amanda Echalaz stands out. If Opera North has a weakness at present, it is an overreliance on stalwart old hands. Perhaps the casting director should get out more.

No complaints, however, about the company’s wonderful orchestra, which allows no hint of routine even in a work as overplayed as this, or about Wyn Davies’s supple, idiomatic and dynamic conducting, which reveals the beauty and mastery of the score – the standard text with a few original restorations – as if it were fresh off the page.

Opera North now has a Butterfly that looks good for a decade or more. With a bit of tweaking, it could prove a classic.