Overcrowding suffocates DNO's Traviata

The tuberculosis that killed the real-life courtesan Marie Duplessis in 1840s Paris, though recently knocked off the world’s deadliest number one spot by Covid, still causes upwards of 1.3 million deaths a year. Like Covid, TB is a disease whose transmission is most likely to occur in dangerously overcrowded conditions. Let’s hope that everyone at DNO had been fully vaccinated ahead of this revival of Tatjana Gürbaca's production.

Adela Zaharia is cast as a Violetta for whom the party never stops. With scarcely a moment to herself from beginning to end, she is forced to contend not only with the ravages of pulmonary collapse, but with the almost incessant presence of an enormous chorus and their many, many shoes all over Henrik Ahr’s inexplicable, single hollow rostrum set. Even on the rare occasions the crowd has clomped off en masse into the wings, minor characters are left behind to enact invasive bits of stage business. Inna Demenkova’s Annina, on stage almost throughout, couldn’t decide, for example, whether or not to keep her high heels on. Meanwhile, Bogdan Volkov, struggling to make an impression as Alfredo, was interrupted by a stage invasion by the chorus (again) this time dressed as the taxidermy display from a provincial museum.

It’s all very distracting, not least for for Zaharia who drove the pitch anxiously upwards and fell prey to a febrile vibrato in which some of Verdi’s most famous melodic lines became difficult to discern. In the scant few bars of music when she is allowed the stage to herself, Zahira’s voice settled and she was at last able to drop the insistence, inhabiting Violetta with poise and tenderness. However, it was not long before Annina turned up again with her mistress’ swimming kit. Well it might as well have been. Actually, it turns out to be Violetta’s dress from Act 1 which she must put on in order to take off awkwardly while singing “Addio del passato”. It’s as if Gürbaca has run individual lines of the libretto through an online symbolism generator.

His interaction with Violetta sidelined by a series of elaborate tableaux, George Petean's Germont sounded fed up, though he looked like a man shouting angrily into a wind-tunnel. The one good thing in this production is the appearance of Germont’s very young daughter, for whom Violetta sacrifices her hope of happiness. The double standard that dictates women must be financially reliant on men or suffer the consequences is, after all, at the heart of the story. A light touch would have done the job, but instead it’s time for another clumsily choreographed outing for the chorus and the unfortunate girl is ultimately obscured by a drove of men in DJs, and their chairs. At this point we are watching an opera upstaging itself upstaging itself.

Even the dynamic Rotterdam Philharmonic are doomed to be only bystanders in this frantic pile-up. Conductor Andrea Battistoni, in order to minimise stress on stage, couldn’t risk anything more than stolid tempi and the result was that Verdi’s ever-popular and sublime score was shorn of much of its characteristic joie de vivre and perhaps even its will to live.