La Traviata

Oddball productions of famous operas proliferate nowadays, but few have been more wrongheaded than Rolando Villazón's 2015 Baden-Baden Festival staging of Verdi's ever-popular 1853 tale of the courtesan Violetta's self-sacrificial rejection of her lover Alfredo at the urging of his pragmatic father Germont. For some reason Villazón has chosen to set the action inside a circus tent, with the secondary characters costumed as clowns and such, while Violetta is followed about by a sort of blonde double who is apparently a trapeze artist. Is Violetta's consumption to be compared to a possible fall from a high wire? Hard to fathom, even if this approach does allow for some spectacular images. In any case, the musical side is not strong enough to compensate for the visual peculiarity. The only remarkable element is Olga Peretyatko's Violetta; her voice does not fit the role perfectly—being more sharp than seductive—but her vocalism is powerful, and while her acting skills are perfunctory, she at least brings intensity to the doomed character. The remaining singers—including Atalla Ayan as Alfredo—are more serviceable than inspired, and it is hard to gauge the performance of Simone Piazzola as Germont when the poor man is made up all in gray, looking like the statue of the Commendatore in Don Giovanni. The playing of the Balthazar-Neumann-Ensemble under Pablo Heras-Casado is energetic, but this misguided version of Verdi's perennial warhorse cannot be preferred to the many other fine versions already available, including the recent 2014 Glyndebourne staging (VL-11/15). Presented in DTS 5.1 (DTS-HD 5.1 on the Blu-ray release) and PCM stereo, this is not a necessary purchase. (F. Swietek)