Though “La Traviata” means “the lost one,” Thursday’s Met performance of the Verdi tearjerker featured a major find: Diana Damrau, who, in her first outing as Violetta, mesmerized with her gleaming soprano and ferocious acting.
Not even the legendary Plácido Domingo, retooling his tenor for the baritone role of the stern father Giorgio Germont, could overshadow her.
Most sopranos play the title role — a dying courtesan who finds and loses true love — with gentle pathos. Damrau focused like a laser on the character’s desperation, raging against impending death.
Since she’s best known as a coloratura, her virtuoso singing of the glittering Act 1 aria “Sempre libera,” complete with a skyrocket of a high E-flat, came as no surprise. But the high point of the evening was her exquisite legato performance of Violetta’s farewell to life, “Addio del passato.”
True, Damrau, who had a second child just five months ago, looked a tad zaftig in the scarlet cocktail dress featured in Willy Decker’s updated production. But that didn’t stop her from manically climbing the furniture in the first act or, at the end of the opera, collapsing so realistically that the audience gasped.
During Domingo’s more than four decades at the Met, he’s often sung the part of Violetta’s lover Alfredo — he’s even conducted the opera. But now the lower range of this baritone part flatters the 72-year-old’s still robust voice, and his nostalgic aria “Di Provenza,” about the family awaiting Alfredo at home, won a long, enthusiastic ovation.
Vigorous and alert onstage, he also found a touching vulnerability in a character usually played one-dimensionally as a stern bigot.
By a happy coincidence, Saimir Pirgu, the Albanian tenor singing Alfredo, could easily pass for Domingo’s son with his Mediterranean good looks. He matched his co-stars’ intensity, and his voice sounded honeyed even when it edged sharp of the pitch.
Conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin breathed new life into the familiar score, with gossamer string playing suggesting Violetta’s fragility. His fleet tempos grippingly communicated the opera’s theme of “time running out” as vividly as the gigantic clock looming over Wolfgang Gussmann’s stark modern set.
Decker’s icy, unsentimental 2010 staging remains one of the Met’s crown jewels, smart and immaculately crafted. Shunning the traditional crinolines and curls, it’s not everyone’s cup of tea — but nobody can say it fails to take the opera seriously as drama.
Even more importantly, the production exquisitely frames Damrau’s Violetta, a singing/acting portrayal to rival the greatest in the world today.