By Roy Proctor | Special correspondent
Virginia Opera’s new take on the world’s most-often produced opera is vocally and instrumentally sumptuous, to be sure, but Verdi’s “La Traviata” at the Carpenter Theatre opens with a visual stunner that will take your breath away.
As Richmond Symphony members deliver the overture with dispatch in the pit under Andrew Bisantz’s baton, a huge white blossom — presumably a camellia — materializes in the air above the stage. Then its petals begin to break off, waft to the floor and disappear, foreshadowing the tragic life that is to shatter into death as “La Traviata” proceeds.
Veteran Virginia Opera stage director Lillian Groag and her superb designers aren’t through with that projected blossom, either. It has more magic to perform, and other Groag innovations come into play as well. Groag, for example, makes splendidly creative use of four fan-bearing women who move in slow motion at crucial times to emphasize the gravity of the tragedy that is unfolding.
But, when all is sung and, on rare occasion, said, this “Traviata” excels as a traditional take on the opera that is tellingly directed, arrestingly designed and sung and acted exceedingly well.
Mexican-American soprano Cecilia Violetta Lopez is the toast of the evening as Violetta, the high-living Paris party girl who is dying of tuberculosis, but not so sick that she can’t snare a true love, the high-born Alfredo, with whom to redeem her wayward life.
In the second act, however, the disease seems to have scrambled her brains when she accedes to Alfredo’s dad’s demands that she give up Alfredo for appearance’s sake. Alfredo’s family, it seems, just doesn’t want a party girl around, redeemed or not, to taint the matrimonial plans of Alfredo’s sister.
Violetta’s judgment call looks pretty silly today — doesn’t she know she has to hang onto her man at any cost? — but the conviction that Lopez brings to Violetta sweeps away all objections. Her Violetta is complex and mercurial as she swings effortlessly from coloratura riffs to Verdi’s unending flow of ravishing melody.
Lopez sings like an angel and manages a compelling chemistry with tenor Rolando Sanz, as Alfredo, and baritone Malcolm Mackenzie, as Alfredo’s emotionally hamstrung dad. Vocally and as actors, both men elicit our sympathy fully by the time one of opera’s most compelling and protracted death bed scenes begins to unfold.
“La Traviata,” which was co-produced with Des Moines Metro Opera in Iowa, ends Virginia Opera’s 2014-15 Richmond season on a particularly ravishing note.