La Traviata, English National Opera

How’s a good time girl to bare her beautiful soul when a director seems bent on cutting her down to puppet size? It doesn't bother me that Peter Konwitschny shears Verdi’s already concise score by about 20 minutes to shoehorn it into a one-act drama; what goes is either inessential or among the usual casualties of standard Traviatas. The spare and economical idea of layered curtains to symbolise the characters' constriction or emancipation is good in principle, too. But so impassioned is American soprano Corinne Winters’s Violetta that to rob her of any meaningful relationships with the man she loves and the father she’s supposed to soften tears the heart out of a brilliant music-drama.

There’s not much vocal shapeliness about conductor Michael Hofstetter’s chilly account of the Prelude (apart from a few surprising blaze-ups, the rest is efficient rather than ideally fluent). And we soon realise there’s distancing in Konwitschny’s initial concept: Violetta the seemingly brittle society victim gets pushed together with bookish Alfredo, a duffle-coated nerd catapulted among the DJs and silks. She can change; he can’t, according to Konwitschny. Country love and a dying Violetta leave him as stiff and awkward as ever. There’s no real ardour, no real anger or regrets for poor Ben Johnson (pictured with Winters in the final scene below) to latch on to. Still, this young British tenor is a real asset for ENO – probably more for Mozart and Britten than Verdi or Puccini, for even this lightish role is a bit of a stretch at the top for him.

Konwitschny thinks we’re more likely to believe in Violetta’s sacrifice for Alfredo’s convention-bound father if the daughter she’s supposed to step aside for is shoved on to the stage as a harrowed, pigtailed schoolgirl: the courtesan might do her best for another downtrodden female. This, though, makes father Germont so much the irredeemable bully that the shifting dynamics of the great duet at the heart of the opera go for nothing (and what’s with the gun Violetta pulls towards the end?) Anthony Michaels-Moore (pictured below), after an unsettled start on the first night which found him hectoring the smoother legato lines, is the genuine Verdi-baritone article, and sings his romance of attempted consolation to the devastated Alfredo with real style. But his character remains as one-dimensional as his son’s.

For Corinne Winters, there are the same obstacles to creating a real human being. In an uneasy balance between stylisation and naturalism, every move seems phoney: drag the curtains here, jump off the chair and collapse there. Which is a terrible shame because, although hers may not be the most individual of voices, she fills it with intensity and can do everything Verdi asks: the coloratura hectic flushes of the determination to carry on with the high life at the end of the first scene, the lirico spinto ability to pull out the vocal stops for the big, desperate phrase of “Love me, Alfredo” and the curving lines of anguish in the second party scene, the tenderness of the too-late last love duet.