La Traviata
Guiseppe Verdi
Barefoot Opera
Arcola Theatre, part of Grimeborne Festival
If Verdi had thought of scoring his most popular opera for a cast of seven with music arranged for piano, double bass, clarinet and accordion he might even have done it because the result – in the hands of this fine company – is delightful. The plangent accordion, picks up most of the wind, brass and string parts and is just about perfect in a small venue.
Musical Director, Laurence Panter, who conducts incisively from the piano is seated behind most of the action and visible to the cast on two tiny black and white monitor screens. It works. He shows up because he’s wearing a bright, white shirt and almost all the singing coheres.
Beren Fidan gives us a very attractive Violetta, every inch a party loving courtesan in the first act but also exquisite and fragrant. She uses her body and face to convey nuance and her soprano voice is both sweet and powerful – it could break glasses at full tilt when she comes to convey anguish or passion.
Tylor Lamani (tenor) eventually matches her as Alfredo although he was a bit gravelly and wooden at the beginning of the performance I saw. The simplicity of their death bed duet in poignant 3|4, the texture gradually thickening as the ensemble picks it up, is a dramatic masterstroke in any production. Here there was a profoundly moving intimacy and a lot of eye dabbing in the audience.
Also top notch was Mike Dewis (bass) as Alfredo’s father. He arrives, of course, to persuade Violetta that she should drop Alfredo in order to save family honour, particularly his daughter’s marriage prospects. He is a always a strange, rather ambivalent character, but Dewis – tall and imposing – makes it work with every note delivered like a drop of gravy and diction so clear that I could almost have managed with the surtitles and I am not an Italian speaker.
The ensemble of four, from which the minor roles emerge, sing the choruses as quartets and you can – at least in the acoustic of the Arcola’s Studio 1 – hear every harmony, even when all seven cast members are singing.
Directors Michael Spenceley and Alfie Chesney have made strikingly imaginative use of the space – bringing characters in from all five possible entrances, including the main steps and the curtain under the stairs behind the musicians. The set is neat too, comprising a set of illuminated boxes and a table which becomes a platform and, in the last act, a bed.
I enjoyed this production very much but as always with La Traviata I was irritatied (mildly) by the plot hole in this opera version (1853) of the play Alexander Dumas fils created from his 1848 novel La Dame aux Camélias. Violetta dies of galloping consumption – just possibly a euphemism for syphilis in this context. She would have died anyway. Her death does not depend on estrangement from Alfredo or the manoeuvrings of his father, although of course all of that heightens the agony. And that pain is beautifully captured in Barefoot Opera’s interpretation.
