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Day breaks in Paris at the end of act one of La Traviata – and, at Garsington Opera’s theatre, half-open to the surrounding Chiltern countryside, the birds provide the dawn chorus. If that registers as a felicitous but accidental touch in Garsington’s first ever production of Verdi’s opera, there’s plenty of equally engaging detail that’s very much intentional – not only in Louisa Muller’s staging, but also in the pit, where the company’s artistic director Douglas Boyd whips the Philharmonia Orchestra through a performance that makes a familiar score feel reinvigorated.
Muller’s staging is another fruit of the company’s transatlantic relationship with Santa Fe Opera, where it was first seen two summers ago. It moves the period forward to the late 1930s, with Paris as a city partying on a cliff edge – not that you’d necessarily know that, except for the blue military uniforms worn by some of the men. We follow Madison Leonard’s Violetta through the doorways, rooms and terraces of Christopher Oram’s revolving set, a world of marble, painted brickwork and wrought iron, silvery and brittle. As the daylight gives way to Marcus Doshi’s stage lighting, the surfaces can look either glitzy or distressed. The same goes for the inhabitants. During the overture we see Violetta’s ghost wander uncomprehendingly from her deathbed to her salon, where her party guests wait, frozen like pastel-coloured waxworks. Later, those same guests carouse at Flora’s in red, gold and black fancy dress – costumes by Klimt, faces by Dix – and they become increasingly robotic and drained of life as Violetta’s illness moves in to consume her.
The cast reunites the central couple from last summer’s L’Elisir d’Amore. Leonard’s Violetta is powerfully sung, her voice nuanced and full of colour; her death scene, drawn out though it may be, is genuinely moving, capping a memorable role debut from this rising US singer. Oleksiy Palchykov is again well matched with her as rash young Alfredo, his tenor full of ringing exuberance. Roland Wood brings a gruff, entitled authority to his father, Germont, whose encounter with Violetta is cruelly well observed: fierceness mixed with resignation from her; blunt incomprehension from him. “I know what a sacrifice I’m demanding of you,” he sings, even as it’s clear that he hasn’t a clue.
Surprisingly for such a seasoned conductor, this is also Boyd’s first Traviata. He, too, brings out plenty of telling details: the clarinet butterflies Violetta feels as she gives in to the idea of falling properly in love; the stabbing punctuations as she initially refuses to submit to Germont’s demand that she leave his son. Above all, there’s a sense of urgency, of time running out – which, together with Leonard’s magnetic performance, makes this an unusually gripping retelling of Violetta’s story. It’s a winning start to Garsington’s season.
