United States Verdi, La traviata: Soloists, Chorus and Orchestra of San Francisco Opera / Eun Sun Kim (conductor). War Memorial Opera House, San Francisco, 13.11.2022. (HS)
Production:
Director – Shawna Lucey
Production designer – Robert Innes Hopkins
Lighting – Michael Clark
Choreographer – John Heginbotham
Chorus director – John Keene
Cast:
Violetta – Pretty Yende
Alfredo Germont – Jonathan Tetelman
Giorgio Germont – Simone Piazzola
Gastone – Edward Graves
Baron Douphol – Philip Skinner
Marchese d’Obigny – Timothy Murray
Doctor Grenvil – Adam Lau
Flora – Taylor Raven
Annina – Elisa Sunshine
San Francisco Opera have rolled out a brand new manufacturing of Verdi’s La traviata and launched top-class singers to the corporate within the three essential roles: South African soprano Pretty Yende, Chilean tenor Jonathan Tetelman and Italian baritone Simone Piazzola.
A hearth alarm emptied the War Memorial Opera House twenty minutes earlier than the scheduled curtain, delaying the beginning by a half-hour (it was rapidly decided to be a false alarm). Once conductor Eun Sun Kim and the three debutants obtained began, the music caught fireplace, and all the things unfolded engagingly in a colourful new manufacturing.
This is the second installment of the corporate’s initiative to create long-lasting units particularly designed to suit the War Memorial stage for ‘legacy’ operas. The first was Tosca, which debuted in 2018 and returned to open the 2021 season. Both are by director Shawna Lucey (a Broadway and opera veteran, just lately named common director of Opera San José down the peninsula from San Francisco) and London-based designer Robert Innes Hopkins.
La traviata has extra pizzazz, though it nonetheless sits comfortably in a standard fashion. It even reproduces the view from the Rue de Madeleine condo occupied by the nineteenth-century girl (Marie Duplessis) who was the mannequin for Marguerite Gautier, the heroine in Alexandre Dumas’s La Dame aux Camélias, who in flip was the inspiration for Verdi’s Violetta.
Houston-based Michael Clark’s lighting design made the manufacturing come to life visually. Midday brightness outdoors the trellised background in Violetta’s summer time house in Act II turned to a burnished glow by early night and underlined Violetta’s darkening state of affairs subtly. The grays of pre-dawn in Act IV, the place Violetta lay gravely sick, picked up ‘sunlight’ via the home windows when she believed, so briefly, that she was nicely once more.
The lighting additionally enhanced the daring colours of Flora’s louche occasion that adopted the summer-home scene, offering a telling distinction with the relative simplicity of the earlier home location. Costume colours made the lead characters straightforward to identify in crowded scenes, and the women’ robes had been beautiful to behold.
Under Lucey’s path, everybody within the solid created distinct characters and interacted with a pleasant lack of artificiality. This was very true of Yende’s Violetta and her tragedy-destined relationship with Tetelman’s Alfredo. Detail after element made issues really feel actual, and moments with Piazzola’s Germont took on the correct quantity of gravitas.
If crowd scenes generally may need benefited from higher visitors administration, there have been telling moments. One got here in Act II, Scene 2 (Flora’s occasion), after Alfredo disgraced himself and humiliated Violetta by showering her along with his playing winnings. One by one, the ladies indifferent themselves from their possessive male companions and surrounded Violetta in a quiet and efficient demonstration of feminine solidarity.
Other particulars meshed particularly with the music. For one, as Alfredo ready to ship his toast on the Act I occasion, he appeared deep in considered what to say. A gesture was timed to the sudden cease Verdi wrote into the music, a second that the majority productions don’t capitalize on. A small factor, however it added to a way that these had been actual individuals.
Vocally, Yende’s Violetta glowed with a wonderful sheen to her voice, and she or he communicated an exquisite vulnerability with seemingly easy appearing. It was a distinctly human portrayal, enhanced by vocal nuances and welcome command of dynamics and refined hesitations. If from time to time she slid up barely into excessive notes, the historically interpolated excessive E-flat on the finish of ‘Sempre libera’ rang out with startling readability, precisely what one needs from Violetta at that second.
Tetelman deployed a lyric tenor of fluidity and pinpoint readability that made his Alfredo engaging, and he put sufficient vitality into his excessive notes at a number of factors in thrilling duets to match Yende’s. Tall and lanky, along with his assured presence and sound, he at occasions jogged my memory of a younger Alfredo Kraus.
Piazzola performed Giorgio Germont (Alfredo’s father) within the normal stern tones, leavened by a beautiful vocal timbre and rock-solid musicality. That might have led to an outpouring of heat when the character sees Violetta’s despair at what he asks of her, however the voice, and the demeanor, hardly modified.
There had been no weak hyperlinks among the many remainder of the solid. Standouts included the vigorous mezzo-soprano Taylor Raven as Flora, Violetta’s gal pal, and tenor Edward Graves as Gastone. This character is often a cypher, however right here was an actual presence, from the second he launched Alfredo to Violetta to when he tried to fend off the social catastrophe at Flora’s occasion.
As Baron Douphol, Philip Skinner, a San Francisco Opera common, lent his wealthy bass-baritone and deftly confirmed an outdated man’s frustrations at dropping Violetta’s attentions. Bass Adam Lau created a sympathetic and smooth-voiced Doctor Grenvil.
Eun Sun Kim continues to steer the corporate’s musical proceedings with uncanny consistency. Conducting her third opera in two months (beforehand John Adam’s new Antony and Cleopatra and Poulenc’s Dialogues of the Carmelites), she reestablished a knack for getting stylistically acceptable music out of the singers and the orchestra. Passionate love scenes reached thrilling climaxes, and offended clashes despatched off electrical musical flares. The remaining scene, with Violetta’s loss of life, might have throbbed a bit extra, however it made its level.
As all the time, the refrain contributed a juicy sound and visible presence to the crowds in Acts I and II, and once more within the offstage hullabaloo outdoors Violetta’s condo in Act III.
Harvey Steiman