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At the home of the courtesan Violetta (Amanda Woodbury), party guests join her in a drinking song.
La Traviata productionl photos by Marty Sohl Photography
September 14, 2018
Once past its inaugural season – adventurous and ambitious, but also uneven and financially fraught – Opera San Antonio offered a steady diet of warhorses. Of the company’s past six fully staged shows, including Verdi’s La Traviata, which opened on Sept. 13 in the Tobin Center, five have been among the 10 most frequently performed operas in North America. But the company was worthy of attention because the performance standard for the casts and the creative teams was consistently high.
In La Traviata, a tragedy of love, sacrifice and moral hypocrisy in 19th-century Paris, the cast racked up the points once again; the conductor and stage director, not so much.
Intriguingly, the cast was drawn entirely from Texas and its diaspora. Of special interest locally was the ideal Alfredo of tenor David Portillo, a San Antonio native and UTSA product who has built a major national career. (Yes, he is the same David Portillo who was plucked from the chorus during a dress rehearsal for a local 2001 production of The Elixir of Love and thrust into the spotlight to replace … a Shetland pony.)
Alfredo, a young upper-crust bourgeois, is a less layered character than Violetta, the courtesan (or professional mistress) he has fallen in love with, but the role demands a balance of youthful ardor and virile determination, reaching to wounded-animal ferocity. In his role debut, Mr. Portillo compassed the full range, thanks to an instrument that proved gleamingly bright and clean in the mold of a genuine lyric tenor, but also steely and knife-edged. With the sole exception of a tenuous high B-flat in the Act II aria “O mio rimorso,” Mr. Portillo hit every mark in every aria with confidence, accuracy, taste, and a rhythmic fluency that seemed altogether natural to both text and music. He brought an affecting tenderness to “Parigi o cara noi lasceremo,” his Act III duet with the dying Violetta. Remarkably, this was Mr. Portillo’s first time singing Alfredo.
Soprano Amanda Woodbury’s Violetta was also a role debut, and in some ways an impressive one. Her buttery, luxurious, agile instrument was entirely pleasurable, but the theatrical result was more an abstraction than the complex individual that the role requires. She glossed over lines that wanted a shift in vocal color or more pointed timing to land their punch. She took no risks – perhaps understandably, for her first Violetta. But it may be instructive to recall that Renée Fleming withdrew from her first scheduled Violetta, at the Met in 1998, because she thought she needed to study the role more deeply. She didn’t feel she was ready until 2003, when she first essayed the role – and took immediate ownership of it – at Houston Grand Opera.
The supporting cast was mostly excellent, top marks going to the warm, sensitive Giorgio Germont of baritone Weston Hurt and the polished Marquis d’Obigny of tenor Matthew Treviño. The chorus, prepared by Dottie Randall, was in good form. And it was nice to see the spirited choreography of former Ballet San Antonio artistic director Gabriel Zertuche.
In the pit, the San Antonio Symphony played well on the whole, but there were too many rough entrances and patches of imprecision under conductor Francesco Milioto, in his company debut. Mr. Milioto has an excellent reputation for his work with multiple opera companies and orchestras in the Chicago area. His Traviata here showed flashes of gumption but was largely generic. The Act II finale showed little evidence of a Verdian pulse or line.
Stage director Garnett Bruce previously did fine work for this company in 2015, when he recreated Francesca Zambello’s provocative production of Madama Butterfly. His Traviata was standard issue, the details naturalistic but not particularly interesting or insightful, and there was too much singing to the proverbial footlights by principals and chorus alike.
The sumptuous, true-to-the-period sets and costumes, designed by Desmond Heeley for Lyric Opera of Chicago, have seen a lot of use since their unveiling in 1993, but they looked good as new here, with evocative lighting by Kathryn Eader. The act curtain, impersonating excessively lavish draperies of gold lamé dusted with soot, perfectly encapsulated the social critique at the heart of La Traviata.
The final performance is Sept. 15 at 7:30 in the Tobin Center.
Mike Greenberg
Opera San Antonio: La Traviata, by Giuseppe Verdi
Love conquers all? Not quite.
incident light
Blast from the past: Tenor David Portillo (center) was a student at UTSA when he sang in the chorus for a local prodction of Donizetti’s The Elixir of Love in 2001. He and a fellow chorister were recruited to replace a Shetland pony pulling a cart in which stood the great bass-baritone William Rhodes as Dulcamara.
Photo: Mike Greenberg
Violetta and Alfredo express their love for each other. Below: Giorgio Germont (Weston Hurt) asks Violetta to leave his son forever.