Elijah Moshinsky’s lush, colourful La traviata gave joy to a whole generation of audiences at the Sydney Opera House, but as it premiered three decades ago, the times was ripe for a new production. A new artistic team delivered a confident and thoroughly enjoyable performance, based mostly on the strength of talented artists making their Opera Australia debut.
Before arriving in Sydney, Sarah Giles’ production has been performed by companies in three major Australian cities in 2022. With the sympathetic collaboration of designer Charles Davis, the Parisian party scenes opening both halves offered an eye-catching flurry of elegant gowns. Lights are bright, the champagne keeps flowing and all the indications of superficial merriment are present. Meanwhile the seedy underbelly of the same society is also blatant, with male guests groping maids and climbing under the dresses of their female partners. Such is the world of Violetta, whose transformation from courtesan to self-sacrificing heroine propels the story to her tragic death.
The staging makes clever use of smoothly moving dividing walls that allow scene changes to flow easily; for example, at the end of Act 1, Violetta, overjoyed with love for Alfredo (who has just departed) rests on her bed, and Act 2 begins immediately with her in the same position (but a few months later) with her lover holding her, without the bedroom wall.
While clearly not aiming at a radical re-imagining, Giles' interpretation offers some compelling dramatic ideas. Act 1 begins with a film-like slow motion of the party, while later, the joyful crowd freezes at an appropriate moment, but with the music continuing. The dream-like sequences in Act 2 were finely executed, with alter egos of the protagonists walking calmly in the background around a withering tree, losing its leaves in the breeze. Touchingly, the opera ends with Violetta, having just sung her ecstatic, final words (“Oh gioia!”), rising from her deathbed and leaving – both in body and spirit – those around her in utter distress, while her alter ego calmly walks in and takes her place.
The party scenes in both acts, so often awkward with members of the chorus attempting to dance, sing and stay in coordination with the conductor and each other, are effortlessly resolved, with best results when, at the beginning of the second half, the chorus watches two dancers (a fine example of stage on stage), turning their heads from one to the other, as if following a tennis game.
Standing out from the excellent cast, Samantha Clarke, as Violetta, sang with perfect command of pitch, dynamics and vocal expression in her astonishingly mature and impressive OA debut. She remained “always free” (“sempre libera”, says the libretto), as her Act 1 aria demonstrated with heartfelt emotion. As an added bonus, both she and Alfredo, Kang Wang, possess credible acting skills and looked their part as young, passionate lovers. Wang’s mellow tone, while not overly powerful, carried genuine human drama, complementing his frivolous brindisi with his Act 2 cabaletta.
Phillip Rhodes impressed with his solid technique as Giorgio Germont, even if his baritone lacks the melting tones that his part ideally demands. His role is a hard one, starting with his ruthless insistence that Violetta leaves Alfredo and, only towards the end of the opera, understanding her sacrifice. His “Di Provenza il mar” should signal the underlying love of a heartwarming nostalgia but it felt more precise than emotional.
Jessica Cottis, in another company debut, conducted with transparently clear, self-assured direction. My overall impression of her interpretation was that she regarded Alexandre Dumas’ original storyline and Verdi’s music primarily as a private drama; intimate conflicts between fallible but sensitive individuals, with the party scenes providing colour and contrast but not claiming the main emphasis. Almost considered as chamber music, the many shades of human drama, expressed as musical gestures and variations in volume, sounded in more subtle hues than customary in a typical romantic opera. As a result, the pathos, the all-consuming emotions of love and grief were less noticeable than typically in 19th-century opera. In musical terms, the composer’s dynamic contrasts and many accented notes, while never missing, were less noticeable than the flow of the music itself. Cottis sustained a faultless balance both within the orchestra and between stage and pit. Her conducting will further improve with more idiomatic rubato but already demonstrates the hallmarks of an excellent opera conductor. The musicians seemed to enjoy the clarity of her indications and played with outstanding accuracy. The sound of the violins, especially beautiful, was further adorned with some exceptional solos from the concertmaster.
