Richard Eyre’s 1994 production of Verdi’s La Traviata has long been a Royal Opera mainstay, carefully moulded over the years to the many casts that have appeared in it. Its latest revival, overseen by Andrew Sinclair, is among its finest, notable above all for its focused dramatic integrity and subtlety of insight.
Joyce El-Khoury and Sergey Romanovsky, both debutants, play Violetta and Alfredo, charting the couple’s tragic relationship with detailed veracity. You sense the mutual attraction from the outset. He hides desire behind a rather lofty reserve, and obsession lurks tellingly beneath his gloriously voiced ardour. She, clearly smitten, is confused and unusually calculating in her initial response. Her smoky tone can harden at the top: Sempre Libera brings with it some moments of effort, but is rightly about conflict rather than display.
Artur Ruciński’s Germont, gritty-voiced yet expressive, is the catalyst that pulls their affair apart. The father-son relationship is superbly delineated, with both men stiff-backed in their demeanour and betraying a comparable inflexibility of will. Ruciński captures Germont’s growing awareness of Violetta’s moral probity wonderfully well, while Romanovsky becomes increasingly embittered, his emotional violence all the more disturbing for its icy control.
Few sopranos, meanwhile, have conveyed Violetta’s misery with such immediacy as El-Khoury, and it’s difficult to get through both the second act party scene and the final act without tears. Daniele Rustioni’s conducting is wonderfully vital, with rhythmic patterns beautifully attuned to the psychological shifts throughout.
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