Currentzis / Fragments

Email this morning alerted me to the existence of a new project by conductor/provacateur Teodor Currentzis, called Fragments, which will consist of videos of opera scenes. The first video is the first roughly 20 minutes of Act III of La Traviata.

The Prelude is about as good as it gets, dark, flexible, sorrowful. The video, shot in moody black and white, is similarly dark, shot in fields and ruins. (The phrase "ruin porn" did cross my mind; ruins as a metaphor for Violetta's tuberculosis, which in itself is a metaphor for suffering, fallen, women.)

I made it past the letter reading, "Teneste la promessa," and then gave up, because the soprano isn't so much reading as whispering. The solo violin in the scene is lots louder than she is. It's as if the audience doesn't really need to hear what she's upset about.

It's true that this is a video, not a recording, not a live performance, not a video of a live performance. It's very much a studio production. Does it matter how far the performers deviate from what would work in live performance? In the opera house, you can't get away with whispering; you need to be heard out there. Should I be more tolerant of the total artifice of the Fragments video? I'm really not sure.

For your listening and viewing:

• Teodor Currentzis / Nadezhda Pavlova, Act III Prelude through "Addio, del passato".
• Claudia Muzio, a classic reading of the letter and "Addio, del passato," made in 1935.