With all the preopening hoopla surrounding Los Angeles Opera’s 1920s Americanized art deco production of Verdi’s “La Traviata,” one hoped for a unique musical experience that could combine the glitter of “The Great Gatsby” with the grit of “Boardwalk Empire.” No such luck.
The concept has merit. There are definitely cultural crosscurrents that flow between the 19th century Paris of the demimondaines and the 20th century era of Prohibition, with its high-class underworld of free-flowing speakeasies, dapper dandies and frolicking flappers. A more imaginative production design and a much more dramatically focused direction could have really made it work. Instead, this “Traviata” is a pretty tepid affair, rather like flat champagne.
The production does, however, feature one very special, even historic, performance — Plácido Domingo singing the baritone role of the concerned, overbearing father, Giorgio Germont.
As Domingo relates in the program: “My association with “La Traviata” dates back to the first year of my career when I sang the role of Gastone. I soon moved on to Alfredo — my first leading role at the age of 20.” Which means Domingo may be the first tenor in history to have a career that’s lasted long enough to allow him to become a baritone and play his own father.
Los Angeles now has been fortunate to hear him in both roles, beginning in the 1960s when Domingo performed Alfredo here during visits by the New York City Opera. His first performance as Germont was in 2013 at the Metropolitan Opera. L.A. Opera’s production represents his second.
Over the years I’ve heard Germont sung by darker-toned baritones, but none possessed more vocal luster and sympathetic emotionality than Domingo’s performance Saturday, particularly when he was trying to influence the behavior of his love-struck son, Alfredo (Arturo Chacón-Cruz).
If anything, Domingo’s Germont may be too sympathetic. When he confronts his son’s lover, Violetta Valéry (Nino Machaidze), whom he perceives to be little more than a high-class gold-digger, Domingo’s Germont lacks a sense of smug, even nasty, superiority. It is a scene of intricately shifting balances as these two powerful characters collide. She must gain his respect, and even admiration. He must convince her to relinquish the one chance she has at true love.
The second confrontation, between Germont and Alfredo, was more effective, perhaps because Domingo brings to it the real-life experience of having raised three sons. It is quite possible that over the course of the run the dramatic fireworks in both these scenes may explode. Whether they do or not, the fact remains that Domingo is an operatic force of nature and Los Angeles has been remarkably fortunate to have had him singing here for so many years.
The production’s design and direction are credited to Marta Domingo, Plácido Domingo’s wife, and represents her third “Traviata” with the company. It’s just too bad that her potentially interesting concept settles for Roaring ’20s generalizations rather than a sharply honed approach that could actually take some risks.
More importantly, Marta Domingo is not a particularly strong dramatic director with the skill to plumb emotional depths and amplify critical conflicts between characters — specifically the triad of Alfredo, Violetta and Germont, which is one of the most dynamically charged in all opera.
The production’s settings also work against the drama. The garden setting of Alfredo’s country home (in Act 2), though picturesque with its autumnal trees and colors, diffuses the action rather than focusing it. The same is true of Violetta’s apartment in the final scene, which is depicted entirely without walls, like Sleeping Beauty beneath a starry, starry night.
Machaidze, who starred as another glitter-and-be-gay girl in L.A. Opera’s production of “Thais,” is singing her first Violetta. She has an impressive voice but is clearly still finding her way into the character, a woman that the late music critic Ernest Newman describes in his definitive essay on “La Traviata” as, “an unstable compound of the sensual and the spiritual.”
Machaidze possesses a strong soprano voice with an astringent spinto edge that comes to the fore when she ascends to the higher register in arias like “Sempre libera.” She could also do more to enhance the reality of Violetta’s health issues beyond swooning languidly to the floor.
Chacón-Cruz is a puppy-dog Alfredo without much bite. His voice is bright and ardent, though tends at times to stray off pitch. His ardent advances toward Violetta, the “It Girl” of the moment, were unquestionably passionate with a “put me on a leash and I’ll follow you anywhere” quality. And in the early moments of the performance there were moments when Chacón-Cruz and Machaidze evoked fond memories of Rolando Villazón and Anna Netrebko. But the comparison was soon gone with the wind.
There were also awkward inconsistencies between the libretto and the onstage action, including multiple references to Paris. This collision of words and actions turned particularly bizarre in the third-act masquerade, when the chorus sang of being Andalusian fortunetellers accompanied by a bold matador, while the dancers (led by Louis A. Williams Jr.) appeared as exotic Orientals out of a Busby Berkeley spectacular.
Fortunately, as always, maestro James Conlon was in complete control of his musical forces. And under his leadership, Verdi’s glory shone through.
Jim Farber is a Los Angeles-based freelance writer.
