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Soprano revelation in La Traviata

Bogdan Radu | Ann Arbor, MI | 08/11/2000

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Even if Vienna was not the place where Violetta died, the conductor Wolfgang Grohs knows how to combine the italian passion of the opera with the delicate melodious music specific to the city. The star of the evening is the Romanian soprano, Carmen Violeta Gurban. As her name predicts, she is Verdi's heroine without the smallest effort. The voice is perhaps one of the most expressive I have ever heard...it is so sweet and so full of passion in the first act. It is so weak and dessappearing in the third act. It is not one of the coloratura voices that makes from the first act a mere belcanto passage. Still the soprano has all the possibilities to sing each and every sound Verdi wrote for the so difficult area: "E strano...E forse lui...Sempre libera". The legato is everywhere, and one can actually feel the emotion when she decides to leave her lover, saving thus his family from the shame: "Ammami Alfredo". The "Addio del passato" is intimate and painful, as it is all the second part of the third act. The tenor Sergei Komov has a good voice but he seems a little bit brutal, especially in the duets with such a fragile Violetta. The choice of including the Cabaletta after his area in the second ("Lunge da lei...")act is not a perfect one, as it proves to be a task way too difficult for the performer. Gerogio Germont is well interpreted by Georg Tichy, and in his case, the inclusion of the Cabaletta after his area "Di Provenza..." seems a good idea. The Cluj Opera Chorus is quite at ease in this opera, and they do a fairly good job. The Orchestra conducted by Grohs is the perfect partner for Violetta's sufferances, and sometimes it seems that those two entities help each other for the perfect combination of voice and orchestra. Concluding, it is something an opera lover should listen to...even if one does not know anything about the performance, it is worth to take this risk, because the satisfaction wilol exceed any expectation. And this advise comes from a person who had really seen the performance of the soprano several times, and has never been deceived."