La Traviata review: Not quite the perfect ending to a fine season
La Traviata: Brett Polegato, Amanda Woodbury and Mario Chang in the Irish National Opera (INO) production. Picture: Ros Kavanagh
★★★☆☆
La Traviata is the last show in what has been a triumphant season for the Irish National Opera. The company's productions have featured inspired design (most recently in the brilliantly realised L’Olimpiade, now heading to London), canny directorial decisions (for instance, transposing Cosi fan Tutte to revolutionary Ireland), and some stunning singing.
By contrast, this take on Verdi’s ever-popular work is more generic, indeed at times rather bland, offering a muted finale to what has been a memorable year for Irish opera fans.
Director Olivia Fuchs and her design team are content not to over-determine the setting, or make daring interventions.
The period costuming is at times garishly-coloured, giving us a suitably roistering, petticoat-lifting chorus of Parisian hedonists. We open to find the doomed heroine Violetta in her sickbed, rendered in bright green.
Violetta’s consumption is, of course, the thread running through the whole opera, the private suffering that contrasts with the carnival-time partying.
On the night we were in the audience, soprano Amanda Woodbury is not on her best form, her voice a little strained and overpowered by the orchestra. It’s a worrying introduction, given the exertions of the role demanded in Verdi’s writing, but thankfully there is a sweetness and openness to her voice by the time she sings that extraordinary double aria at the end of Act 1, as Violetta contrasts the temptations of love and joys of freedom. It’s a brilliant, rightly famed passage.
Alfredo, the reason Violetta is so torn, is played here by Mario Chang, in strong voice throughout. His initial hesitancy as he extemporises the toast in the Libiamo drinking song is charming. Then the chorus rallies, the opera’s most famous tune bouncing merrily along under Killian Farrell’s lively conducting.
Indeed, it’s the chorus scenes that offer the most fun on the night, especially when the matadors and gypsies arrive. The joie de vivre in the combined voices and Jessica Kennedy’s choreography stands out.
By contrast, the more intimate moments fail to draw us in as effectively as they might. The titter of laughter that greets the doctor’s prognosis of Violetta’s swift death is perhaps a sign that the audience has not quite gotten fully wrapped up in this story of doomed love.
It’s a production, then, that lacks a key dramatic dimension, but nonetheless gives much to enjoy in its music, singing, and movement.
- At Cork Opera House May 29 & 31
