Traviata triumphs: A dark and
original version of Verdi's popular operaReviewed by ARTHUR KAPTAINIS Montreal Gazette
Monday, February 11, 2002
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Gianna Corbisiero as Violetta: she and other cast members prove Canadians live in a "garden of good voices." |
One of the great favourites of the standard repertory, Verdi's La Traviata almost stages itself. To its credit, the Opéra de Montréal has mounted a dark and original conception of the melodrama that does no violence to the story or the music. Even those pleasure-seekers in Place des Arts who left the premiere on Saturday with a grumble were probably quietly impressed.
This was the ugly Art Nouveau production first unveiled by the company in 1993, so stage director Franois Racine had some freedom (not to say incentive) to be creative. He dispensed altogether with the set for Act III, presenting Violetta's death under a stark spotlight. The effect was to eliminate the trappings of Paris - which, after all, she has left behind - and focus on the reconciliation with Alfredo and the tragedy of her passing.
Even the celebrated party scene of Act I was a relatively low-key affair, much more about the social pressures besetting the principals than the vivacity of city life. Violetta's great canary vehicle, Sempre Libera, was done in low light. The offstage serenading of Alfredo clearly functioned as the inner voice of a courtesan who has contracted a condition even more irreversible than tuberculosis. Always free? Not when you are in love.
The Paris to which Violetta and Alfredo returned in Act II was a kind of high-class hell, the chorus illuminated in ghastly tones by Guy Simard and the frivolous ballets treated as pantomimes on love, fate and fidelity. Yet acting throughout was naturalistic and restrained. The paradox might have overpowered a lesser opera than this.
Or lesser singers in the main parts. Soprano Gianna Corbisiero as Violetta sounded overwhelmed at the start of the party - a situation somewhat exacerbated by the staging - but her solo scene was vibrant and she deepened her colour perfectly for the more realistic exchanges of Act II. The country house where she and Alfredo are free to love, significantly, is bathed in light.
Tenor Marc Hervieux - also a native Montrealer and alumnus of the Opéra de Montréal Atelier - was a youthful-sounding Alfredo with enough electricity in his fundamentally lyric voice to support his furious renunciation of Violetta in Act II. There is nothing in the Pavarotti repertoire this singer could not handle.
Toronto baritone John Avey was firm and warm as Giorgio Germont, and a good enough actor to make us feel a tinge of sympathy for a father whose application of conventional morality causes infinitely more harm than good. Marie-Josée Lord, the bright-voiced soprano who played Violetta's maid Annina, merits special mention among the supporting players, all of whom were drawn from the Atelier.
Conductor Jacques Lacombe furnished typically incisive leadership in the pit. One could hardly have asked for more chilling intimations of imminent death from the orchestra in the final scene. That ensemble was the Montreal Symphony, not the Orchestre M?tropolitain, as the program listed it in a rather embarrassing Freudian slip.
That the production was all-Canadian might have been a big deal a decade ago. Now it seems merely a natural consequence of something most of us have long known: we are living in a garden of good voices. Let us hope that the next artistic director of the company notices.
- La Traviata, in Salle Wilfrid Pelletier of Place des Arts, repeats tonight, Thursday, Saturday and on Feb. 20 and 23. There is limited ticket availability. Please call (514) 842-2112 for information.