La Traviata, Opera North, Grand Theatre, Leeds, review: 'quite moving'

Opera North's production of Verdi's opera could be played with more suppleness, says Rupert Christiansen

La Traviata performed by Opera North at the Grand Theatre, Leeds.
Ji-Min Park as Alfredo, Hye-Youn Lee as Violetta
La Traviata performed by Opera North at the Grand Theatre, Leeds. Ji-Min Park as Alfredo, Hye-Youn Lee as Violetta Credit: Photo: Alastair Muir

La Traviata has suffered many indignities in recent years at the hands of directors determined to identify the heroine Violetta with the AIDS pandemic, sex traffickers, celebrity culture and other horrendous phenomena of modern life.

So let us heave a sigh of relief that Opera North’s new production has no such blunt axe to grind or crude parallel to point.

The staging is the work of young Alessandro Talevi, whose ideas I have previously both admired (The Turn of the Screw, also for Opera North) and deplored (Anna Bolena for WNO). He has passionate determination, intelligence and flair, plainly, but youth’s fatal desire to show off has sometimes got the better of him.

Here, however, he keeps his head, taking a broad middle ground and making no attempt to undermine the weeping sentimentality of the libretto or adopt some gratuitously novel perspective. His only bright-boy wheeze comes during the opening Prelude, when Violetta is shown staring into a vast moon-like circle on to which are projected magnified microscopic images of mutating bacilli, malign viruses and diseased lungs. This isn’t pretty, or clever either.

Madeleine Boyd’s designs economically evoke the fin de siècle Paris of Proust’s and Colette’s fiction - a location which updates the original scenario by half a century and perhaps makes the opera’s dramatic focus - the power of a stern socio-moral code which stigmatizes non-marital sexual relationships - marginally fuzzier and less plausible.

But no serious harm is done to Verdi’s conception, and Talevi and Boyd paint the scenes of whoopee with rather more colour and pizzazz than Glyndebourne did last summer. There’s much thoughtful detail in evidence too: to take a small example, no production in my experience has ever bothered to explain how respectable Germont finds his way to Flora’s louche party; but here we see clearly that he has picked the address off Violetta’s crumpled letter. Knotting up loose ends of that sorts is an essential part of good direction.

The greatest Violettas always make one feel that she knows she is doomed from the start. Korean soprano Hye-Youn Lee is too steely for that: very much a ball-breaking good-timer, wielding an efficient soprano that cuts with a hard edge through the haverings and regrets of “Ah! fors’e lui”.

Yet in the second scene, as Germont cajoles and threatens, she softens, weakens and appeals, making the cry of “Amami Alfredo” a confession as well as a farewell. In the final scene, the emotional impact of “Addio del passato” is diminished by a want of floated pianissimo, but the fierce urgency of the reunion with Alfredo makes her death - spectrally witnessed by gloating lovers from her past - quite moving.

Her Alfredo is her compatriot Ji-Min Park, puppyish in his ardour and inclined to over-semaphore his emotional highs and lows, but always a hundred per cent committed and engaged. Roland Wood is without doubt the best singer in the cast - his rich yet crisp baritone is a finely tuned instrument - but I didn’t sense his Germont as being on a spiritual journey, led out of his cool presumptions by Violetta’s sincerity and dignity.

Gianluca Marciano’s conducting didn’t go anywhere much either, his four-square tempi and banal phrasing being less than seductive. Opera North’s orchestra can play with more suppleness than it did here. But this is a Traviata which will give offence to nobody and pleasure to many.

Until 1 November, then touring,

0113 243 9999; www.operanorth.co.uk