Sumptuous `Traviata' Shines on a Grand Scale

The mid-November run of the Boston Lyric Opera's La Traviata marks several firsts. This is most importantly the first show of the 1998-99 season of the Boston Lyric Opera, which now in its 22nd year is considered to be the fastest-growing opera company in America. This new season is also the first time the company is performing at the lavish Shubert Theater (usually reserved for touring Broadway companies), right next door to their old venue, the Emerson Majestic. This is also baritone Hector Vasquez's debut on the BLO stage after four seasons at the Metropolitan Opera.

And finally, this is soprano Dominique Labelle's debut in the lead role of Violetta Valery and her second performance with the Boston Lyric (she debuted with last season's Lucia de Lamermoor).

La Traviata takes the hackneyed idea, "you can't judge a book by its cover," and turns it into something breathtakingly beautiful. The story centers around Violetta Valery, a French "courtesan"--basically an upper-class prostitute who provides parties and other entertainments for the members of the upper middle class--who, despite her shallow and flamboyant lifestyle, is caring and gentle at heart. Although she is very weak due to a severe case of tuberculosis, Violetta persists in throwing boisterous fetes that only make her worse, and the opera opens in the midst of one of these late-night revels.

Violetta's honest devotion to and many sacrifices for her lover, Alfredo Germont (played by Rafael Rojas), teach the haughty aristocrats (namely Alfredo's father, Giorgio Germont, played by Vasquez) of mid-century Paris how endearing and tender this supposed easy woman can be. The whore with a heart of gold? It's been done, you say. But not to the music of Giuseppe Verdi: the passion and the thrill of his music will make every Mira Sorvino '89/Elisabeth Shue '88/Kim Basinger poseur-hooker seem like a mean-hearted trollop in relation to the radiant and self-sacrificing Violetta.

Under the baton of BLO Music Director Stephen Lord, the Boston Lyric's in-house orchestra proved their worth as a tightly focused ensemble that rarely overpowered the singers. The orchestra consistently rose to whatever musical tasks Verdi's score demanded--be it charming and bubbly Parisian waltz music, subtle love aria music, or even the passionate, bombastic, coronary-inducing orchestral forces sometimes needed in the more histrionic scenes of high tragic opera.

Opera ultimately belongs to the singers, however, and La Traviata was no exception. All the performers, leads and chorus alike, showed remarkable vocal prowess and passion, and among the minor characters mezzo-soprano Gale Fuller's charming and coquettish Flora Bervoix (a courtesan whose wardrobe is far more scandalous than that of Violetta) was especially memorable and a well-needed break from the heavy tragedy of the rest of the opera.

The weakest of the leads was tenor Rojas in the role of Alfredo, his sophomore performance with the BLO (after debuting triumphantly last year in Werther). Alfredo goes from one emotional extreme to another in the course of the opera--love, ecstasy, awe, anger, revenge and loss is a lot for three short acts--and the role consequently requires an actor who is able to convey this both dramatically and musically.

Rojas is more than up to the task vocally--his voice is full-bodied and intense, if at times in a middle vocal range that makes it hard to project--but acting-wise, Rojas has fallen into the the trap of the magnificent singer who is plauged with an inability to act convincingly. He did seem to open up through the course of the opera, but his slightly grotesque nuzzling of the deathbed-ridden Violetta seemed contrived and ingenuine.

The true "hidden treasure," so to speak, of the evening--and a powerful singer who had no trouble at all acting--was baritone Vasquez, singing the difficult role of Girogio Germont (a man of high character who realizes he is not as morally superior as he thinks). Debonaire and upright, Vasquez had just the right amount of vocal and dramatic tenderness to keep the role of the pushy father from being a flat-out S.O.B. This is to be attributed no doubt to Vasquez's robust, no-nonsense singing style, which was intense and virtuosic without coming across as being overtly flashy.

Most of the opera, however, belonged to soprano Labelle, completely entrancing in the title role of Violetta Valery. After making her debut last year in BLO's Lucia de Lammermoor Labelle was named The Boston Globe 1997 Musician of the Year, and with good reason. Her vocal and stylistic range is almost unfathomable: in the course of roughly 10 minutes at the end of the first act, she goes from airy coquettish high notes to the wistful, delicate "Goodbyes" to the passionate lament of the "misterioso" theme that haunts the entire opera. She pulls off coloratura singing--that ornamented style of singing with lots of extra notes, scales and vibrato thrown in for effect that is so easily botched by less capable and confident sopranos--remarkably well, jumping up and down the scale and throwing in lots of trills and other musical treats with consumate ease. Her acting is just melodramatic enough to be believable in the larger-than-life world of opera but not so hysterical or overly mopey that it is annoying. Her only noticable slip-up came at the very end of her death scene, in which she fell rather unceremoniously into the arms of Alfredo rather than using the more dramatic death-swoon that is needed for depressingly tragic high Romantic opera. But by that time the audience was so enamored with her and with the self-sacrificing Violetta she brought to life that she was immediately greeted with a lengthy standing ovation (one can assume that a less blue-blooded Back Bay Brahmin audience would have been more enthusiastic with lots of whistling and whooping).

Looking at what Boston Lyric can do with their first show in a new venue, it's understandable that they are one of the fastest-growing opera companies in the world. If this sumptuous and thrilling production of La Traviata is any indication of what this not-so-little "company that could" can do on a first try, Bostonians--blue-bloods and musical thrill-seekers alike--have a lot to look forward to.