La Traviata review – gripping and genuinely moving staging opens Garsington’s summer season

Garsington Opera, Wormsley
Louisa Muller’s richly detailed production of Verdi’s tragedy is elevated by Madison Leonard’s magnetic Violetta and Douglas Boyd’s musical direction that reinvigorates the familiar score

Day breaks in Paris at the end of act one of La Traviata – and, at Garsington Opera’s theatre, half-open to the surrounding Chiltern countryside, the birds provide the dawn chorus. If that registers as a felicitous but accidental touch in Garsington’s first ever production of Verdi’s opera, there’s plenty of equally engaging detail that’s very much intentional – not only in Louisa Muller’s staging, but also in the pit, where the company’s artistic director Douglas Boyd whips the Philharmonia Orchestra through a performance that makes a familiar score feel reinvigorated.

Muller’s staging is another fruit of the company’s transatlantic relationship with Santa Fe Opera, where it was first seen two summers ago. It moves the period forward to the late 1930s, with Paris as a city partying on a cliff edge – not that you’d necessarily know that, except for the blue military uniforms worn by some of the men. We follow Madison Leonard’s Violetta through the doorways, rooms and terraces of Christopher Oram’s revolving set, a world of marble, painted brickwork and wrought iron, silvery and brittle. As the daylight gives way to Marcus Doshi’s stage lighting, the surfaces can look either glitzy or distressed. The same goes for the inhabitants. During the overture we see Violetta’s ghost wander uncomprehendingly from her deathbed to her salon, where her party guests wait, frozen like pastel-coloured waxworks. Later, those same guests carouse at Flora’s in red, gold and black fancy dress – costumes by Klimt, faces by Dix – and they become increasingly robotic and drained of life as Violetta’s illness moves in to consume her.
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