Madama Butterfly, Royal Opera House, London <br></br>London Sinfonietta/Adÿs, Queen Elizabeth Hall, London

She can flutter, but can she really fly?

Puccini was the Baedeker of bel canto, forever whisking his audiences off for a spot of operatic sightseeing: goldrush California in La Fanciulla del West, ancient Peking in Turandot, 19th-century Rome in Tosca. Even the Paris of La Bohème acquired an exotic glamour, thanks to its prettified low-life milieu. For Puccini, location begat situation, character and emotion, nowhere more so than in Madama Butterfly, set in Nagasaki circa 1900.

Paradoxically, the plot's attention to specific detail gives it added urgency today: an insensitive American (Pinkerton) tramples over a culture he doesn't understand, taking what he wants (Butterfly, his Japanese wife) without regard for long-term consequences. Moshe Leiser and Patrice Caurier's new Covent Garden production has no need to underline the contemporary relevance; it's already there.

Unfortunately the plainness of their staging eventually proves inert. As the curtain rises, a cluster of butterfly cut-outs, strings all too visible, flutters heavenwards. Two-and-a-half hours later, Butterfly's death throes re-enact that fluttering motion; in both cases, the visual metaphor is merely sentimental.

Christian Fenouillat's set opts for plain walls and bare floors, the kind of minimalism that stands for "Japanese". Screens at the rear rise and fall, revealing a stylised landscape that changes according to the mood of the story, without ever looking anything but stagey. Too much of the action is equally conventional. Everyone sings facing out, and while the Japanese walk with hobbled gait, Marco Berti's Pinkerton spreads his arms wide to remind us that this is only opera.

At least the story is told clearly, never an achievement to take for granted. The role of the Bonze, the uncle who rails against Butterfly's marriage, is no more than a brief cameo, but it highlights the enormity of her decision to abandon her native religion. Sweeping across the stage like a vengeful spirit raised from the dead, Jonathan Veira chews on his words as if he can taste the bile. Would that Lucio Gallo sang with as much character. As Sharpless, the US consul who tries to make things tolerable for Butterfly, he is decent but dull: apt for the part, but more feeling and greater variety of intonation would not go amiss.

But in Puccini, it's the tenor and soprano who matter most. While the Pinkerton of Marco Berti never convinces as a character, the voice has the right weight: rather pinched at the top, perhaps, but with ample ardour. In purely vocal terms, it's a more attractive instrument than Cristina Gallardo-Domas's, but then her Butterfly is more than purely vocal. She shapes her body into an extraordinary amalgam of Japanese theatrical gesture, broken-doll puppetry and silent-movie vamping. That it proves so convincing speaks well of her collaboration with Leiser and Caurier.

As her slo-mo dance pushes Pinkerton towards bed at the end of Act One, it's clear she is no sexual innocent, which isn't to say that she herself is not seduced by the moment. And as tragedy tightens its grip, her movements become more distracted, more distorted. In this context, it is dramatically right that an almost metallic ring enters the voice when Puccini puts it under pressure (which, of course, is quite often).

It helps that Antonio Pappano is her conductor. Always attentive to his singers, he knows when to hold back, when to go for broke. As he builds the tension through the closing moments, Gallardo-Domas leads the orchestra to the very edge, and despite her flapping spasms, the fall of the curtain brings a sense of catharsis. Hers is not a conventionally beautiful vocal characterisation, but it forces us to realise just what has been at stake for Butterfly. A single performance rarely redeems a production; hers comes close.

In a commendable search for variety and musical texture, the London Sinfonietta seems never to programme pieces that require anything like the same instrumentation. The result is that between each work, a small army of helpers is required to rearrange the furniture; the music sometimes feels like an interlude between the pauses. Or perhaps that was simply in the nature of the aphoristic pieces which Thomas Adès conducted, with his usual undemonstrative efficiency, in last weekend's concert.

Judith Weir's Tiger Under the Table, receiving its world premiere, proved a typically inventive musical fable. The composer divided her 14 players into groups which, as it were, paid little attention to each other. An extrovert little tune for trumpet did what it could to pull things together, but the string quartet insisted on going its own, swoony way, while the winds argued amongst themselves. Eventually, the piano grasped what the trumpet was getting at, but before unity took hold, Weir's playful jeu d'esprit came to an end.

The ability to build a mood, then subvert it in next to no time is also characteristic of Gerald Barry's nervy, jittery music. There were moments in his Sextet which sounded like a merry-go-round about to break down, while Before the Road, for four clarinets, crammed 11 movements into half as many minutes. The first began gently, but soon became agitated; the second seemed to finish half way through; the third was forever on the verge of becoming a tune; and on it went. Perhaps we needed those long pauses between pieces if we were not to become nervy and jittery ourselves.

'Madama Butterfly': Royal Opera House, London WC2 (020 7304 4000) to 10 April; BBC Radio 3, 2 April; BBC2, 12 April

Anna Picard is away