“Peter Kazaras, with his directorial penchant for confounding expectations. After a “Midsummer Night’s Dream” set in an English boarding school and an “Enfant et les sortilèges” with its action transferred to a subway station, what was to be expected from his take on “Butterfly”?

But Kazaras never does anything eccentric for the sake of being outrageous: He does it to illuminate important aspects of an opera that we might otherwise never have thought of. I had certainly never imagined that what a “Butterfly” needs is restraint; Kazaras had the wit to come to that conclusion.”