‘Traviata’s’ Got Heart

Opera’s love affair with love--and with glamour--must make it seem a perfect art form for Valentine’s Day. And L.A. Opera took advantage on Sunday by opening its new production of Verdi’s “La Traviata,” the work that best symbolizes the power of a love able to surmount the glitter of the 19th century Parisian demimonde. The Dorothy Chandler Pavilion was full of couples--as it normally is at opera time, if not always so smoochy.

Marta Domingo, the director of the co-production (staged in Liege, Belgium, in 1996 and last season at Washington Opera), asks in a program note that we please allow her to leave Violetta in her world and her time. This is a story, she tells us, of “LOVE (and I do mean love with capital letters),” but its morals are of its own fascinating age. Actually it’s a story of death--opera loves death more than it loves love. Verdi originally wanted to call his opera “Amore e Morte” (Love and Death), but was prevented from doing so by the Italian censors. And Domingo, and especially Carol Vaness, who sings Violetta, make it a story of DEATH.

Violetta, of course, is the consumptive yet irresistible courtesan with a soft spot for money and society but an even greater weakness for a dashing young man named Alfredo. Vaness portrays her as a desperate woman, already seriously ill in the opening party scene. She wrenches herself out of fits of coughing. There is a certain drama in this--Vaness’ acting is subtle and strong. She performs even the drinking song with an intensity, one that continues and grows throughout the opera. She strives for the dramatic power of a Callas, and she comes close to achieving it. Her death scene is one of gripping realism--she is even willing to allow herself to be made up to look, in unflattering light, as pale and drawn as a dying woman.

Vaness’ singing, too, is of a piece with her interpretation. Hers is no longer a young voice, and she is probably better suited these days for slightly more heroic roles where she can exploit a steely hardness. She can hold a listener rapt in the precision of her dramatic phrasing, in the theatrical detail she can bring to a word or a note.

A mature, emotional, disease-wracked yet heroic Violetta is not without our sympathy, and certainly not without a sophisticated allure, but she is not exactly the figure that one would expect to stand out any longer in a crowd of gorgeous courtesans (the milieu Domingo so wants us to enter) for the kind of Alfredo represented by Greg Fedderly.

The local tenor made good (Vaness, by the way, is a local soprano made good, but she has traveled longer and farther than Fedderly), is young, handsome, eager and uncomplex in both manner and voice. There may be room for concern in the lack of bloom in his high notes (and I was sorry not to have heard him sing the second-act cabaletta, “Oh Mio Rimorso,” which was cut, as it often is). He does look silly lounging in his green smoking jacket, but Alfredo isn’t supposed to be a rocket scientist, just a kid still learning about love and out of his league.

He also has an overbearing, pompous father to escape, particularly as portrayed by Finnish baritone Jorma Hynninen. His icy sternness certainly wouldn’t have won me over to give up a lover, as it does Violetta, but Hynninen did pour out a rich, powerful tone in his beloved aria, “Di Provenza il Mar.”

Domingo, who is a former singer and the wife of Placido, does little to make much sense of these three different personalities. Giovanni Agostinucci’s pretentious sets and costumes are no help: a first-act party scene in what looks like a 1970s Beverly Hills garden restaurant on steroids, a “modest” country villa on a monstrous scale, a garish bordello that should embarrass even Las Vegas, a regal deathbed altar. Each setting seems to mirror the progressive nature of Violetta’s illness.

To the performance’s great advantage, however, is the fluid, sensitive conducting of Gabriele Ferro, who is particularly useful in supporting Vaness in her best moments. He also makes the opera into a convincing musical argument and keeps firm control over the company, which includes Megan Dey-Toth (Flora), Catherine Ireland (Violetta’s maid, Annina), Malcolm MacKenzie (Marquis d’Obigny), John Atkins (Baron Douphol), Jamie Offenbach (the doctor) and Charles Castronovo (Gastone).

* “La Traviata” continues Thursday, Sunday and Feb. 24 at 7:30 p.m., Feb. 27 at 1 p.m., March 3 at 7:30 p.m. and March 6 at 1 p.m.; $25-$137. Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, 135 N. Grand Ave., (213) 365-3500. https://www.laopera.org.