Search - La Traviata - Love & Sacrifice, the Story of the Opera / Angela Georghiu, Kathleen Cassello on DVD

A good TRAVIATA documentary

Filippo Secondo | 01/13/2009

(3 out of 5 stars)

"This short film (50 minutes, excluding the long concluding credits) might not appeal to those who know the opera well: apart from some enlightening commentaries by performers like Alagna, Nucci and others, much of the narrative simply summarizes the plot from start to finish. The work is represented by three contrasting productions, one of them being the 1994 from London with Gheorghiu: the other two haven't yet been made available complete on DVD (an elegant French production from Orange with a very young Alagna, and a terrible German production from Stuttgart with a relatively obscure cast - Wolfgang Schone has no business singing Germont - the scenery resembling that of Gotz Friedrich's 'time-tunnel' RING). Not a brilliant documentary (its miserly duration isn't value for money, and there are no subtitles, excluding the English captions for the excerpts sung in Italian), but it's worth renting by TRAVIATA lovers and (especially) those new to the work. 3 1/2 stars.

PS Contrary to what the writer of the Product Description above claims, Marie McLaughlin isn't seen singing Violetta here (there's just a glimpse of her - 5 seconds - in the Peter Hall/Glyndebourne production): the appearance of her name on the cover is also misleading, since the only Violetta being interviewed is Kathleen Cassello, Alagna's partner in the Orange extracts."