Music / “La Traviata” by Giuseppe Verdi, Handa Opera on Sydney Harbour. At Mrs Macquarie’s Point, Sydney. Reviewed by HELEN MUSA
A PUMPED-UP crowd on Friday night (March 26) greeted the revival of an old favourite, “La Traviata”, with understandable enthusiasm as the unseen conductor Brian Castles-Onion whipped up the Opera Australia Orchestra to a crescendo of fine Verdi playing.
The production had been successfully reconvened after last year’s last-minute cancellation of the harbourside event. Not just reconvened, the 2012 production by Francesca Zambello had been revisited and somewhat revamped by young director Constantine Costi.
While Tess Schofields’s 1950s costumes were retained, there was additional choreography by Shannon Burns and the addition of a neon-etched Parisian skyline (you could see The Sacre Coeur and the Eiffel Tower) by designer Brian Thomson that contrasted well with the real-life background of harbour, Opera House and Luna Park.
But some elements were the same, including the huge dominating chandelier moved about by a crane, the perfect vehicle for lighting designer John Rayment’s lighting design, which delighted an audience basking in the ambience of sunset time on Sydney Harbour.
The crowd had not long to wait before a lavish burst of fireworks enhanced the famous Brindisi drinking song at the end of Act One, with the partial result that it was all downhill for there on as the tragic tale of the consumptive Parisian courtesan Violetta and her ardent young admirer Alfredo wound to its melancholy end.
On the way, the audience was visibly delighted by the large-scale, demi-monde scenes as Violetta’s friend Flora (Celeste Haworth) and their brittle cohort sang out their love of worldly pleasure. As one audience member near me said: “Opera is nice but it’s much nicer outdoors”.
I would question that.
“La Traviata” is essentially an intimate work, with only a handful of real protagonists and playing it out on such a large arena was beset with the problem that singers often seemed to be sing AT rather than WITH one another.
There is no question that the gifted soprano Stacey Alleaume as Violetta sang her showstopper, “Sempre Libera” (always free) with the virtuosic skill this aria requires, and that Rame Lahaj as Alfredo made up for lack of vocal precision with passion, but somehow, in the wide-open spaces, the pair never seemed to connect.
The same could be said for the pivotal scene between Violetta and Alfredo father’s Giorgio Germont (Michael Honeyman ) in Act II, where there was only formal engagement.
The huge surtitles served expose the limitation of Piave’s libretto as Violeta attempts a kind of self-analysis which dominates the second half of the opera, but the principals did rise to the occasion in the tragic Act III, with wonderful restraint and conviction, and as they brought the opera to its final chords, there wasn’t a dry eye in the house.
To many in the audience, the experience of this operatic excursion into the open was all about sensations, evident in the undeserved round of boos that greeted Honeyman, a very sympathetic Papa Germont, when he took his curtain call and the contrasting foot stamping which greeted the young lovers.
It was, in terms of sensations, a night to remember.
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