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The Independent, January 20 2008 |
By Anna Picard |
Verdi: La traviata, Royal Opera House, 14 January 2008
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La Traviata
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Overstuffed sets and buttressed costumes do
their best to squeeze the life out of Verdi's doomed heroine, but it's worth
fighting for a ticket for this Covent Garden revival just to see Anna
Netrebko |
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A few years ago in Leeds, something very
surprising happened to me. After a lifetime of rolling my eyes through the
last act of La Traviata, tutting at its cruelty and mawkishness, I was
shaken by Violetta Valéry's death for the first time. There wasn't much to
see on stage – an age-spotted mirror, a dusty chaise-longue, a half-seen
ghost of the heroine's hedonistic past – and the singer was not a celebrated
diva with a contract to promote expensive timepieces. But where other
directors had framed the death of poor, beautiful, consumptive Violetta in
yet more beauty, making it limpid, exquisite, unreal, Annabel Arden's
stripped-back production for Opera North showed a woman made ugly by illness
and loneliness and poverty and fear. All of which is there in the music.
Ever since the lights went down on Arden's production, I've been a sucker
for this opera, sniffing into my hanky from the first death-bed chords of
the overture. Even bad productions make me cry, and it's all because of that
last act, and Janis Kelly's fierce, honest, text-led performance. I cried
this Monday at Covent Garden too. Yet I left the star-studded revival of
Richard Eyre's 1994 production feeling oddly dissatisfied: moved by Anna
Netrebko's fearless reading of Violetta's last, desperate, candid
confession, but scandalised that such an uninhibited and spontaneous actress
should be shoe-horned into this frigid, fusty show.
Its 10th revival of La Traviata sums up all that is best and worst about the
Royal Opera House. Only a handful of companies could afford to field
Netrebko, Jonas Kaufmann and Dimitri Hvorostovsky in one cast, and, of those
that can, only this house has a chorus of sufficient dynamism to match them
and a young artists programme with talents as stage-ripe as Monika-Evelin
Liiv (Flora) and Kostas Smoriginas (Marquis). Conductor Maurizio Benini, if
over-indulgent of his singers' whims, is a supreme stylist, and the
orchestral performance, though slow to warm up, was strong. Musically, all
is well. But Eyre's production is a faded relic of the pre-Pappano era, and
only Hvorostovsky (Germont) – a marvellous voice in a mannequin's body –
adheres to the pre-Pappano protocol of stand-and-deliver singing.
Regrettable as it is that Hvorostovsky has eyes only for Benini, a stiff
Germont is not the end of the world. But Bob Crowley's over-stuffed sets and
fussy costumes allow for little fluency of movement from anyone. Conceived
as a showcase for Angela Gheorghiu, the production calls for poignancy and
passivity: a creamy voice in a pretty face. Netrebko, though pretty, is a
different animal. Her dark, giddy, uneven voice has less polish than
Gheorghiu's, more sprezzatura, more appetite. And if the touchstone of this
production is death, Netrebko's – and Verdi's, for that matter – is the
process of dying. Revival director Patrick Young has assisted Netrebko to
some degree by replacing the overture's memorial portrait with images that
suggest Violetta's progress from little matchgirl to pubescent plaything,
and has attempted to illustrate a powerful sexual attraction between her and
Alfredo, though the chemistry is weak.
Kaufmann's singing is beautiful but unidiomatic, his characterisation
diffident, as though he is ashamed of Alfredo for loving Violetta too
little, too late, and would prefer to be acting in a production that
critiques the opera. But this is Netrebko's moment, and though her
bronchitic bark, flushed cheeks, urgent physicality and desperate eyes are
undermined by the buttressed costumes she is made to wear in Acts I and II,
and her restless spinning suggests she is still in thrall to Willy Decker's
modern-dress Salzburg Festival production, she stamps her vitality on the
role: underscoring each repeat of "follia" (madness), grasping with both
hands her only chance of love, resisting the death she knows to be
inevitable. Liberated by the relatively empty set and simple nightdress of
Act III, she tears into each nuance of Violetta's music and words, the rough
cry of "E tardi", the misery of "Addio passato", the hopeless fantasy of
"Parigi, o cara". For her in-the-now performance alone, it is worth fighting
for a ticket for this in-the-then show. If Netrebko isn't big enough to
merit a new production of La Traviata, it looks as if we're going to be
stuck with this one for a few years more. |
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