La traviata, Royal Opera House, London, review: Joyce El-Khoury commands the stage with radiant authority

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The plot of Verdi’s most perfect opera has a dreadful symmetry. Courtesan Violetta falls in love as she is dying, but is forced to renounce the brief happiness marriage might have brought on the altar of bourgeois morality; the entire action turns on three relationships.

The Violetta in this revival of Richard Eyre’s classic production is the Lebanese-Canadian soprano Joyce El-Khoury, and, from her first soliloquy to her final aria as she laments her fate, she commands the stage with radiant authority. Her pianissimi are exquisite, her coloratura is bold, fearless and flawless, and the expressiveness of her sound grips the heart. Sergey Romanovsky’s Alfredo is gorgeously sung, but stiffly acted; this Violetta-Alfredo relationship works so well musically, however, that its dramatic shortcomings scarcely matter.

Artur Rucinski is a musically-engaging baritone, but he’s fatally miscast as Germont – he looks more like Alfredo’s younger brother. And he has no idea how to act his role: time and again his body-language directly contradicts the words he is singing, with the result that the great emotional duels of Act Two go for naught. Was director Andrew Sinclair asleep on the job?

In all other respects, with Daniele Rustioni conducting, and with the supporting cast – including gypsies and tumblers – in fine form, this 14th revival still makes an excellent evening.