Today’s opera singers are expected to be persuasive actors, and that can be a challenge given the very short dramatic trajectories their characters must ride in the pages of most libretti.
In the case of Violetta Valéry, the doomed heroine of Giuseppe Verdi’s La Traviata, sopranos have enough splendid music that if their acting is less than persuasive, they can still make a strong impact in the role.
But the best Violettas are good actresses as well as fine singers, and in the Lebanese-Canadian soprano Joyce El-Khoury, Palm Beach Opera has a performer who has the makings of a great one. El-Khoury opened the company’s 51st season Friday night at the Kravis Center with an emotionally compelling, richly sung reading of this seminal role.
It was a performance that grew on the listener, too, because while El-Khoury has a large, darkly colored, expressive instrument whose quality was evident from the first notes, it also is not particularly flashy. And so, for example, she eschewed the interpolated high E-flat at the end of Sempre libera, an aria for which many sopranos unleash the full commanding heights of their inner divas.
What we got in return was a heartfelt, sympathetic Violetta, sung by an artist with an impressively accurate, thorough technique in which she regularly demonstrated her control with quick, effective fades on the high notes of a phrase. She did this especially well in her Act III Addio, del passato, adding some poignant tension to a beautifully sung, movingly portrayed moment of regret and despair.
El-Khoury’s voice showed no sign of strain at any point in the opera, which bodes well for her future in Verdi roles (she’s doing two more Violettas and a Desdemona this year), and her dynamic range was wide and even throughout. What her Violetta could use is some more initial devilry in Act I; one got the sense that here was a woman who was very attractive and popular, but also very nice at the same time. Yet the character needs a not-so-nice sense of matter-of-fact calculation about the coin of her hedonistic realm, which she has minted through a real love of pleasure as well as an acceptance of the benefits her beauty and youth has brought her.
And that extends to the music. The high-floating display of Sempre libera has to be light and showy, with the little three-note descending figures tossed off like afterthought icing on a finished cake. El-Khoury’s reading had too much of the careful student about it, and while it was very well-sung, it stayed earthbound (and the audience reaction was only polite, not enthusiastic). Still, this is a soprano who has mastered every note of the part (this is her fourth Violetta), and she has all the physical and intellectual gifts to make her eventual reading of it truly memorable.
Her Alfredo was the Russian tenor Georgy Vasiliev, last seen on the Palm Beach Opera stage as Edgardo in last season’s Lucia di Lammermoor. At his best, Vasiliev has a pleasant, pretty spinto, but his singing was uneven Friday night. He was fine in the Libiamo of Act I, but he was able to impart little to no feeling of romantic impetuousness to his portrayal at all; he came across as shy and conflicted, but this is a passionate, spendthrift guy whose reason for wanting to meet Violetta is that he’s had a lustful crush on her for a year.
Not a wallflower, in other words, even if his ideal of love is much more promising than another night of booze, gossip, dancing and mercenary sex. He was much better vocally in duet with El-Khoury, and in Act III, his voice had relaxed enough from its initial uncertainty and stiffness to have a real bloom about it as he tried to comfort his dying paramour.
But his acting was unpersuasive, and while this is admittedly a thankless role, Alfredo should at least be magnetic and forceful, so that when he throws money in Violetta’s face at the end of Act II, it comes from somewhere deeply felt. Vasiliev had none of that fire, and therefore little reason for the audience to understand why Violetta would be drawn to him.
The American baritone Michael Chioldi, on the other hand, was an excellent Germont, and won the first warm applause of the evening with his lovely reading of Di Provenza il mar in Act II. His sturdy, big voice has a softness and flexibility to it that made his interpretation of Alfredo’s father less imperious than others, and it was in his duet with El-Khoury, Pura siccome un angelo, that this production of Traviata found its sea legs.
The two singers melded expertly, and in their give-and-take one could hear how Verdi had moved away from the conventions of his time toward an expressive naturalism. Gone are the arias for each emotional arrival; in its place are urgent phrases that move the action along and build the tension gradually.
In the minor roles, baritone Jake Gardner was a serviceable Baron Douphol, and as Flora, the Iranian-Canadian mezzo Shirin Eskandani was strong and bubbly (one looks forward to her upcoming appearances in this season’s La Cenerentola and The Turn of the Screw). Her fellow Young Artists – tenors Marco Stefani, Kyle Erdos-Knapp, baritone Scott Purcell and bass-baritone Peter Tomaszewski – acquitted themselves ably; best of all was soprano Alexandra Batsios as Annina, whose voice has a kind of clarity and purity that made it distinctive.
Director Renata Scotto, whose illustrious career as a soprano began in 1952 with this very opera, had El-Khoury as the focus all evening, and gave her some effective bits of staging, such as the standing-still look Violetta gives Alfredo in the midst of the crowd in Act I, and her playful discarding of her shoes as she decides to choose the life of the party girl at the end of the act. Overall, Scotto’s staging was unproblematic, as well as conservative and traditional, but with an intimate, sensitive series of movements for Violetta that helped buttress El-Khoury’s interpretation.
The young conductor Case Scaglione led a fine Palm Beach Opera Orchestra, though Act I was unusually muted, with the musicians holding well back, apparently to let the singers stand out some more. That made for a sluggish, slow-moving act, with not nearly enough life and fun. Act II was better, but here, too, Scaglione pulled his punches for the big choral ending of the act, making the brass-rich cadence that returns twice at the conclusion emphatic but not powerful.
Greg Ritchey’s chorus was hit-and-miss, coming in shakily in the last verse of the Libiamo in Act I, and the men-only torero song in Act II was painfully weak (no reason to shun surreptitious female help here). The chorus sounded best in Act II, but they needed to be much sharper in Act I, and help lift it out of Friday’s flabbiness.
The Utah Symphony and Opera’s one-set-fits-all worked well, and Peter Dean Beck’s scenery design, originally for Florida Grand Opera, made a most effective use of color, aided by Julie Duro’s smart lighting. John Lehmeyer’s costumes looked lovely, particularly Violetta’s figure-flattering Act I dress, and Kathy Waskelewicz’s hair design for Violetta, from pinned-up social elegance in Act I to careless, ragged suffering in Act III, added depth to the characterization.
This is a La Traviata with a noticeably clunky Act I, but I would attribute much of that to opening-night unease, and expect that by Sunday afternoon it will be much more spirited. It has, at least in its Violetta and Germont, two singers who can take the opera to a substantially more engaging level when everything else comes together.
La Traviata can be seen with this cast at 2 p.m. Sunday at the Kravis Center. Tonight, Sarah Joy Miller takes the role of Violetta, and her real-life husband, Il Divo’s David Miller, is Alfredo. The opera begins at 7:30 p.m. Call 833-7888 (opera), 832-7469 (Kravis), or visit www.pbopera.org or www.kravis.org.