After a very successful performance of “Il Cappello di paglia di Firenze” by Nino Rota, the Carlo
Felice theater in Genoa inaugurates the new year with a production of one of the most loved and
performed works of all Italian melodramma, La Traviata.
Taken from the novel by Alexander Dumas son “La Dame aux Camélias” ,a famous feuilleton which told the story of Margherita Gautier, a high-class prostitute, Verdi made from it a revolutionary opera for the times, a drama in which the hypocrisy of bourgeois society was staged, the some bourgeois that going to the theatre, saw themselves mirrored in the scenes and party dresses.

The success of this cornerstone of the repertoire on the stage is due, above all to the voice and
stage charisma of the protagonist, who is entrusted with perhaps the most complex role of the
entire female repertoire.
It is said among opera lovers that three sopranos are needed to sing the role of Violetta, a
coloratura soprano for Act I, when Violetta is a frivolous and voluptuous woman, a lyric soprano
for the elegiac abandon in Act II, when in the encounter/clash with Giorgio Germont decides to
sacrifice herself for love and return to her former life, a dramatic soprano, when dying, she recalls her life in the poignant “Addio del passato”, before passing away at the end of a short and painful life.

For this production, the theatre had counted on the unrivalled charme of the Russian soprano
Olga Pereyatko, who unfortunately had to withdraw to undergo a delicate surgery. She was
replaced by Carolina López Moreno, an emerging soprano of Bolivian-Albanian origin, musically
trained in Germany; the singer had just returned from highly successful performances at the
Maggio Musicale Fiorentino in the roles of Madama Butterfly and Traviata. The high audience’s
expectations were not disappointed; to the undeniable beauty of the stage figure, the singer
combines a voice with a very fascinating timbre, uniform throughout the whole range, with a
particularly secure and bright high register.

The first act was approached by the singer with great caution, the tremendous agilities of
“sempre libera” were resolved correctly but without the feverish excitement that the cabaletta
would require, and the Eb5 of tradition was avoided. In the second act, López Moreno gave life to a superlative performance, vocally and emotionally perfect, the climax of which was the great
duet with Giorgio Germont, a sublime monument of Verdi’s art, adressed with a variety of accents and a musical line of the grandest interpreter.
In the third act, after an excellent reading of the letter, the “ Addio del passato”, performed in its
entirety, was resolved in a very introspective and participatory way, although the singer’s search
for pianissimi was not truly successful and did not give results comparable to those of the
historical interpreters of the role; the memory of Mariella Devia’s unforgettable interpretation of
this “aria” in 2013 is still alive in the hall of the greatest theatre of Genoa. López Moreno again
rises to the top in the opera’s finale, with a vocally and scenically moving interpretation of

Violetta’s death. Given her great vocal and scenic gifts, we are sure that the soprano will be one of the most prominent performers on the opera scene in the coming years.
In the role of Alfredo Germont we find the Genoese tenor Francesco Meli, a favorite of the home
audience. Meli has been playing the role since the beginning of his extraordinary career, and
despite his moves into a more dramatic repertoire (Manrico, Radames, Otello) he still remains the reference interpreter of the role. Since from the Brindisi “Libiamo ne’ lieti calici” Meli has been appreciated for the beauty of his timbre, a voice of typically Italian colour with very clear diction and the variety of colours and nuances. The aria “de’ miei bollenti spiriti” is resolved as a truly singing lesson on breath and authentic Verdian phrasing.

In the role of Giorgio Germont we find baritone Roberto Frontali, whose mature voice, is perfectly exploited by the singer to adapt to Alfredo’s old father. Frontali is a great phraser and portrays a Germont wounded in his bourgeois conventions and betrayed in his paternal affection. His performance of the aria “Di Provenza il mar, il suol” was exemplary in this regard and in the finale of the second “ripresa” he achieved a pathos that we had never heard in such a famous piece. Renato Palumbo’s conducting was excellent. After last year’s successful ‘Il Corsaro’, he corfimes himself as an authentically Verdian conductor, perfectly supported by the excellent Orchestra and Choir of the Theatre. Palumbo renounces seeking post-romantic languor and decadent colours in Traviata, but gives it an alive reading, in which the great play of colours and the power of Verdi’s instrumentations and scenic words stand out. In this sense, the balance between voices and orchestra is almost perfect.

The theatre reproposed for the third time Giorgio Gallione‘s disputed direction, in which Violetta
already dies in the prelude and the whole opera is a long flash back full of symbols not always
perfectly understandable to the audience; many, especially the younger ones, wondered what was the meaning of the tree that dominated the scene for all three acts; it seems that in the director’s intentions it is a representation of the bourgeois hypocrisy that moves the entire terrible tragedy of La Traviata.

The Sold-out theatre decreed a great success with repeated open-scene applauses and final
ovations to all the protagonists!