Glyndebourne’s autumn season – no longer a touring one, following Arts Council England cuts – opens with a revival by Laura Attridge of Tom Cairns’s 2014 production of La Traviata, a beautiful piece of theatre that serves Verdi’s tragedy uncommonly well. Mindful that the work itself was groundbreaking in its realism, Cairns mostly strives for theatrical naturalism, and the avoidance of grand histrionic gestures that smack of anything conventionally operatic. There’s little to distract from social observation and psychological insight.
Hildegard Bechtler’s designs give us a series of sparsely furnished rooms, minimalist yet smart. Costumes – jackets, ties and tuxes for the men, pencil skirts for the women – suggest the early 1960s. The erotic divertissement at Flora’s soiree feels better integrated than when I last saw it, and indeed the subsequent scene, in which Matteo Desole’s Alfredo publicly humiliates Elisa Verzier’s Violetta, generates extraordinary tension without once seeming melodramatic. The peculiarly symbolist ending, however, when sets and lighting gradually become abstract as Violetta’s life draws to its close, still strikes an awkwardly jarring note.
It’s for the most part beautifully sung by its new cast, with the added luxury of three native Italian speakers in the leading roles, though Desole, warm in tone but taking time to settle on opening night, overdoes the wide-eyed gawkiness in act one, where his acting feels fractionally too large in scale compared with what surrounds him. Verzier, on the other hand, is a really lovely Violetta. The voice, extremely beautiful albeit not large, suggests both emotional strength and physical fragility. She has the requisite agility for act one, but wisely avoids showily interpolated high notes. Later on, there are moments of deep, restrained intensity as well as some exquisite soft singing. Dite Alla Giovine, done with a rapt, introverted pianissimo and an immaculate sense of line, is breathtaking.
In the big act two confrontations, meanwhile, she is matched, in the other great performance of the night, by Christian Federici’s Germont. Handsome of voice and presence, he sings with unforced lyricism and exemplary dynamic control. Di Provenza, given in this instance in full, can so often seem anticlimactic after everything that has gone before, but here we really sit up and listen. He’s a good actor, too, giving us a finely considered – and unusually sympathetic – portrait of a man confronting the disastrous consequences of his own inflexible morality.
The conductor, meanwhile, is Adam Hickox. Like Desole, he took a while to settle in act one, where speeds were extreme and Un Di Felice felt unduly slow. Thereafter, however, he builds the tension with a measured inexorability that gets under your skin. The Glyndebourne Sinfonia’s playing is excellent, and there’s first rate choral singing, too.
• At Glyndebourne, Sussex, until 2 November.
