La traviata, Opera Holland Park, review: A heartfelt and handsome revival that hits all the right notes

Young soprano Alison Langer is infinitely touching as Verdi's tragic heroine Violetta

Sometimes the stab of Verdi’s La traviata comes from denial – from the bustle and brilliance of Parisian life and first love that sweeps us up in its spell and persuades us to forget the finale we know is coming. Not so here.

In Rodula Gaitanou’s handsome staging for Opera Holland Park (first seen in 2018) the pain is of a different kind. Just like the withered hothouse flowers in their vases, briskly removed and replaced during the Act I Prelude, this Violetta is marked from the start – her colourful life decaying from within as we watch.

The effect is urgent – never more so than in this post-Covid revival, where the hoarse breathing that confronts us before we hear a note of music reminds us of the cost of seizing the day.

There’s nothing tricksy about a traditional staging that lives in its details: the strained interaction between Violetta and Stephen Gadd’s unapologetically bourgeois Germont, desperate to turn an emotional encounter into a transaction; the social currents and hierarchies that ebb and flow through the party scenes. Cordelia Chisholm’s skilful sets enclose Violetta in her own gilded glasshouse – both prison and refuge.

In 2018, soprano Alison Langer took the role of Violetta in the Young Artists Performance. Here she (and fellow Young Artist alumnus Stephen Aviss) graduate to the principal roles in yet another example of a scheme that’s long been a funnel for exciting new talent.

Aviss sings a solid Alfredo, strained at times, struggling to get over the newly central orchestra despite Matthew Kofi Waldren’s sensitive accompaniment (a pocket-sized string section sing like the Vienna Phil).

You can see how his awkward, boyish hero is drawn to the brittle brilliance of Langer’s Violetta, whose generous lyric soprano blurts initially before blooming into an exquisite Act III. This is a heroine draining life straight from the bottle, knocking it back in one gush in “Sempre libera”.

This isn’t yet a finished performance. But Violetta isn’t a finished heroine, and there’s something infinitely touching about Langer’s reinventions through each act, the malleability of a character adapting to every new blow, her choices fewer and fewer.

With strong support from veteran Gadd as well as Laura Woods’ sumptuous Flora, this heartfelt revival hits all the right notes.

La traviata is at Opera Holland Park until 29 June

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