La Traviata (Blu-ray)

With its spectacular Seebühne floating on Lake Constance, the Bregenzer Festspiele celebrates its 80th anniversary with a series of sold-out performances, each offering breathtaking visual spectacles for an audience of nearly 7,000 spectators. Damiano Michieletto’s staging of Verdi’s La traviata, set in the Roaring Twenties, captures the broken woman’s shattered life through a irror tilted towards the sky. Marjukka Tepponen’s outstanding Violetta showed “intimate heart through sheer force of personality, expressive intelligence and vocal beauty” (OperaWire). On her side, Julien Behr interprets Alfredo “with lyrical warmth and palpable passion” (Orpheus Magazine), whilst Vladimir Stoyanov interprets Giorgio Germont with such “naturalness, elegance, grace and vocal expressiveness that he can be regarded as the baritone of choice for this role” (OperaTeatro). Conducting the excellent Wiener Symphoniker, Kirill Karabits proves to be a very sophisticated Verdian conductor, “bringing extraordinary dynamic and tonal subtlety to the score” (interclassical). A production that was “visually ambitious, theatrically sophisticated and, at its best, genuinely poetic” (OperaWire).