Vocal pleasures and some real star turns, but too many mirrors reflect badly on Verdi’s drama.

Her Majesty’s Theatre Melbourne

May 17, 2014

Last evening’s premiere production of a Verdi opera by Victorian Opera, elliptically known as ‘The Traviata of the Mirrors’, was far more potent at presenting the work of famous Czech Scenographer, Josef Svoboda, in Australia for the first time, than for the intrinsic merit of the production itself.

But this production of La Traviata its not entirely doom and gloom as first intimated.  Jessica Pratt as the grande amoureuse and consumptive heroine, Violetta, and the refinement of José Carbó in the dramatically difficult role of Germont, rescued the evening from one of the most desultory readings of this intimate and sublime score that I have heard. Very few pieces in the music of Verdi’s 1854 version of this opera lack a metronome mark. Very few were closely realised. Moreover, not having the well-honed finesse of Orchestra Victoria in the pit appears, without further knowledge of their absence, rather ill advised.

The large mirror surface that comprises Svoboda’s primary physical set is now so common a scenographic device in large-scale theatre, that it is easy to forget the impact it...