The Mikado - Act 1 Finale.flv 

Soul of it. tough role and when done well a joy

Not an easy role but Heather Begg sails through it

Katisha's entire character is basically beautiful and emotive moments in grotesque context. Good call.

Conductor David Lloyd-Jones (1934-2022) had nothing whatever to do with the D'Oyly Carte, and your assumption that he must have "listened to Isidore Godfrey's recordings" is rather presumptuous! Fyi, Lloyd-Jones was the founding conductor of Opera North, as well as a scholar who edited editions of (among other works) The Gondoliers and Mussorgsky's original Boris Godunov. He made fine English-language performing translations of the Mussorgsky and of Tchaikovsky's Yevgeny Onegin. He also recorded a great deal of British music with distinction; I particularly cherish his version of Vaughan Williams's ballet Job, and of the complete Sullivan/Mackerras Pineapple Poll. Like Charles Mackerras, he brought a real depth of musical experience to Sullivan's music, as in this wonderful studio production.

Jean Allister on the 1962 Sadler's Wells set is also superlative.

Not really, it's intentionally ignorant of Japanese culture but doesn't sincerely try to demonize Japan. However a number of performances of it do resort to racist techniques like yellowface or grotesque accents and slant eye gestures.

Yes and No, it just depends on if you think being pretty off the mark of a culture is racist or just ignorant as PlanetBobstar pointed out.

It was originally intended as a satire of England, with Japan used only as a setting. This setting, however, can be problematic nowadays.

@@PlanetBobstar Really? Well, if there are productions that use "yellowface" or other racialist markers, they certainly aren't following Gilbert and Sullivan's intentions, judging from the photos and pictures of the earliest productions. The Mikado was transparantly a satire on a rigid, class-bound Britain; a moden equivalent might be Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill's Mahagonny, set in an over-the-top money-obsessed "America" that was a stand-in for Germany in the precarious 1920s. Director Mike Leigh (Topsy Turvy) has rightly called the assertions that The Mikado is racist "rubbish."