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With so many La Traviata DVD’s available that feature “superstar” sopranos (Edita Gruberova, Angela Gheorghiu, Anna Netrebko to name but three), I popped this one into my DVD player with some trepidation. After all, Renee Fleming, handsome though her advise is, has been known to turn a Verdi aria into a jazz number. And Rolando Villazon is a wonderfully expressive tenor, but has a tendency to overact and can wear you out with his flailing about onstage.
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I’m satisfied to characterize that my concerns were untrue. As Alfredo, Villazon is in even better deliver than he was in the 2005 Salzburg production of Traviata with Netrebko. He has also toned down his physical movements; his acting is an asset here, not a distraction.
Fleming is stunning as Violetta. I assume the reason she sometimes jazzes up 18th and 19th Century opera is that she can do anything with her instrument; this is a original and special ability that unfortunately has sometimes led her to obtain the defective style choice. Here, however, she sings Verdi as I retract the master intended. She pays careful attention to phrasing and is faithful to the win, yet also sings with abandon, making Violetta truly her enjoy. That combination of the seemingly contradictory qualities of control and abandon are what, to me, execute for titanic opera singing. (Those same qualities also portray the modern sound of many Verdi scores.) Fleming brings the house down before she can even rep to the eminent, “Sempre Libera,” by turning “Ah! Fors’e lui” into such a bittersweet and keen contemplation on the possibility that worship has finally found her, that her radiant trills at the destroy will compose your spine tingle.
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Some people were disappointed that Dmitri Hvorostovsky bowed out as Germont in this L.A. Opera production and was replaced with Renato Bruson. Bruson does a magnificent job and, in fact, I was disappointed with the usually friendly Hvorostovsky when he played Germont in the La Fenice 2004 production of Traviata. He was strangely stiff and remote as the concerned, if overbearing, father. He seemed wretched as Germont (which, of course, may not have been the case two years later in this production) . Nevertheless, the old-fashioned Bruson brings the accurate balance of sternness and fatherly like to the role.
Call me customary fashioned, but I cherish Traviata with lush sets and period costumes. If you do too, you’ll drink in the sights here.
I’ve decided that I don’t need to secure the definitive DVD of La Traviata. Violetta is such a multi-layered character upon whom Verdi has made such varied vocal demands that I like to appreciate the highlights each soprano brings to the role: Gruberova’s vulnerability and how she seems to literally proceed away as she sings “Addio del passato”; Gheorghiu’s great and heartbreaking roar, “Amami, Alfredo,” in which she turns a few short musical phrases into a stand-alone aria; Netrebko’s spontaneity and charisma. And now I can add Fleming to that list. She sings every line with distinct intention; not a ticket is thrown away. Precision and abandon. It’s a attractive performance.
Let us hope that the Alfredo, Rolando Villazon, recovers hasty and in chubby from the unspecified difficulties that, at this writing, have forced him to destroy approximately half a year of engagements, and may have contributed to performances earlier this year suggesting a vocal crisis. In the 2006 Los Angeles TRAVIATA, he improves on his promising Alfredo opposite Anna Netrebko a year earlier at Vienna (preserved on DG DVD and CD) . The phrasing is more veteran and pointed, the burnished tone and virile address mighty as before, and the portrayal marked by less exaggeration and straining for finish, although that last may have something to do with his being liberated from Decker’s cretinous production. He is physically and vocally matched to this role in a arrangement that makes me mediate of di Stefano, and I hope that the similarities do not extend too far — a di Stefanoesque premature burnout would be a gigantic loss for us all. He cements his area as one of the front-rank documented Alfredos by making even the cabaletta “O mio rimorsa” (no more than pro forma early Verdi on the page) sound very nearly like large music.
Renato Bruson, as Germont pere, has appeared in lead roles all over the world since his professional debut as Count di Luna in 1961, and had reached the broad age of 70 by the date of this performance. Germont has long been a Bruson specialty, and he recorded it commercially opposite Renata Scotto and Alfredo Kraus (Muti/EMI) almost 30 years ago, when he was the youngest singer of the principals, playing the oldest character. We all of us are at the mercy of time, and one struggles to write about the modern performance without recourse to the patronizing. My first impulse, for example, was to call his work here “mettlesome,” but that would not do justice to the tubby achieve. I verbalize the best design of putting it across the plate is to say that you will gawk long and hard to gain a 70-year-old baritone who can manufacture Germont on this level, and who commits so exiguous for which any apology is significant. The learned Mr. Davis’s editorial review accuses Bruson of mistaking stiffness for authority; I respectfully dissent. This is a Germont who is stubbornly of his time and his milieu, bright and well-behaved of feeling but not easily swayed by sentiment, nor dissuaded from a considered course of action. Survey him carefully in the long encounter with Violetta in Act II, think who Germont is and what he believes, and ask yourself if the venerable Bruson does not gain more of it apt than at least three-fourths of the Germonts you have seen (if you have such a frame of reference) . In the beginning, he is brusque but never menacing or heavy-handed. He has the determination and conviction we want and inquire of from a Germont, and an appropriate quality of encroaching frailty and mortality that we very rarely get; this colors all of his appearance and interactions. Recognize at him and listen to him when Violetta repeats benefit in questioning obtain, with surprise, the information that Germont has *two* children — in his short response there is a mingling of paternal admire and pride and a distracted quality (as if this has near out absentmindedly), a desire to travel the conversation along and continue to drive the agenda. When Violetta asks him to embrace her as a daughter, he seems both touched and slightly embarrassed. In his appearance and manner, Bruson is Giorgio Germont to the life, and for the greater duration of the time he was on stage, I was struck more by how remarkable of that burgundy velvet remark he has left than by what the passage of the years has rubbed away. The fortes are not always ideally controlled, and the climax of the entreaty to Alfredo, the chestnut “Di provenza,” does not near easily, but it would be a harder heart than mine that could remain unmoved by this “Di provenza.” For me, it was the most affecting fragment of the evening: an opportunity to search for and listen to one of the last living, working links to an idiomatic performance tradition in Italian opera that, if not dying, is certainly not in the thriving estate that it was 40 years ago. While this L.A. audience carries on a bit too mighty for my taste, stopping the exhibit with applause after essentially every discrete number, occasionally to the detriment of musical continuity, Bruson richly deserves the loud “bravo” that some male spectator shouts after that aria concludes, and the ovation that follows. Had I been there, I certainly would have added to its volume.
To Renée Fleming’s Violetta, the reaction is more ambivalent. Fleming’s basic persona is a warm and titillating one. She looks smashing in Giovanni Agostinucci’s period costumes, and she excels as the favorable hostess of Act I. We know precisely what Alfredo means in Act II when he sings blissfully of her “gentle smile of cherish,” for we have already seen abundant evidence of it. The shaping and deployment of the grand Act III aria “Addio del passato” are clearly the work of a major singer. Too, Fleming has worked hard at the fioritura. In Act I it detached *sounds* like work, but it is a dutiful and conscientious wretchedness. The trill at “Ora son forte” in Act III is, wonder of wonders, fine (I even checked it against that of an esteemed recorded Violetta whom one would interrogate to be better at this sort of thing, and the impression held) . Her ripe-sounding tone is not ideal for this allotment, to my ears, and there are long stretches of the role requiring that she prefer up location in high altitudes where she would be more comfortable making only brief visits. She wisely avoids the unwritten high E-flat at the slay of “Sempre libera,” but does anyone really care anymore? (One breed of Italian opera buff obsolete to claim that any Violetta who failed to screech that imprint was a failed Violetta, no matter what went on for the remaining two-plus hours. One hopes that this breed has become venerable.) My reservations about the performance are more about questionable stylistic and dramatic choices on the soprano’s share than the purely vocal matters. Although this is not as mannered a performance as her most divisive ones of original years have been, there are oddities. What carry out, for example, is achieved — other than a precious kind of distinction for the sake of it — when the musically famous word “misterioso” (in “Ah fors é lui”) is minced out in five truncated, still notes, rather than ones travel together in a legato phrase? Violetta’s broad plea “Amami, Alfredo” reach the ruin of Act II is similarly sectioned out rather than unfurled, although there it seems less a mannerism than an unwisely dead tempo choice; she has to attack it in pieces because she otherwise could not breathe through it. Perhaps the most interesting music in the opera, Violetta’s “Alfredo, Alfredo, di questo core” (sung upon her awakening from her faint at Flora’s Act II party), is also too tedious — not only in and of itself but in relation to the ebb and breeze of the majestic ensemble of which it is the cornerstone — and the vocalism is weighted with needless lily-gilding affectations to boot. Often I had the sense that conductor James Conlon was not so remarkable *complicit* as he was *compliant*. Every one of the points of the obtain where I felt the music was being pulled out of shape so that the singer could overmilk a phrase or exaggerate some dramatic point, was a Violetta passage (Act II’s “Ah, dite alla giovine” is one more in the pile of exhibits) .
A final word on the topic of exaggeration: Fleming’s histrionics in the crucial Violetta/Germont confrontation are not well calibrated, and I am not clear whether the blame for this should be laid on her, director Marta Domingo, or both (from prior experience with Fleming and Domingo separately, I tend to suspect the soprano) . More subtlety and a behind invent to despair are needed here. Fleming does so mighty audible sobbing, gasping, and vocal thickening to suggest singing through tears that at moments when the grief is supposed to ratchet up, she has left herself nowhere to go — she can only serene more heavily underline what she already has been doing. Violetta Valery is a sensitive woman of deep feeling and tragic predicaments, yes, but there are other sides to her: stoicism, a core of iron, and an innate nobility that Giorgio Germont picks up on almost immediately. The Violettas of Albanese and Callas, de los Angeles and Scotto, Caballé and Cotrubas, Stratas and (though her complete performance is beset with other problems) Netrebko evidenced this. They were very different singers and very different women, but they knew where the dramatic keys were in the scene, and they knew how to acquire positive we did as well. This is the greatest shortcoming of Fleming’s Violetta and of this entire production — in such an principal scene, this grand character is exiguous more than a teary matron hanging over the arm of a couch, all but drowning out the baritone with Lucy Ricardoesque sobs.
The Los Angeles Opera Orchestra and Chorus produce laudably for Conlon, whose work is sensible and proportionate when he is not overindulging the soprano. Marta Domingo’s production eschews eccentricity without eschewing initiative — most of the central action is sympathetically and intelligently worked out, and there are spicy things going on around the margins. I particularly liked the treatment of Annina, whose admire for her mistress and anxiety at her impending loss advance through more strongly here than is usually the case (the comprimario singers, this is a honorable time to say, are uniformly safe) . This surely would be a candidate for inclusion on any list of the most visually magnificent opera DVDs available at note. Decor is sumptuous and vivid (director Domingo herself has a background in form, and her credentials presumably influenced the shape of Agostinucci’s costumes and sets) . The report quality has a honest cinematic sheen. The ubiquitous video director Brian Broad continues to exhibit that he is ubiquitous with reason; what he chooses to emphasize is always pertinent, often telling. He even gets pleasant reaction shots from the choristers playing guests in Violetta’s Act I party, which Domingo has imaginatively staged al fresco.
And so, for a conventional TRAVIATA with state-of-the-art audio/visual credits, a formidable contender. The most ardent fans of Fleming, or those who feel they will be untroubled by what I report as musical and histrionic infelicities marring an intermittently impressive Violetta, should feel free to add a star.
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