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Grand Spectacle and Intimate Truth in the Amphitheatre Verona
Arena
06/12/2026 - & June 13, 20, 27, July 5, 9, 16, 31, August 6*, 22, 29, September 5, 12, 2026
Giuseppe Verdi : La traviata
Martina Russomanno/Gilda Fiume/Vasilisa Berzhanskaya/Rosa Feola* (Violetta Valery), Anna Werle*/Clarissa Leonardi (Flora Bervoix), Francesca Maionchi (Annina), Yusif Eyvazov/Galeano Salas/Francesco Meli/René Barbera/Antonio Poli/Enea Scala*/Adam Smith (Alfredo Germont), Amartuvshin Enkhbat/Mihai Damian/Youngjun Park/Ludovic Tézier/Luca Salsi* (Giorgio Germont), Carlo Bosi (Gastone), Nicolò Ceriani (Baron Douphol), Zim Myshketa*/Jan Antem (Marquis d’Obigny), Mariano Buccino (Doctor Grenvil), Francesco Pittari/Andrea Vincenti/Nicolò Dal Ben/Eder Vincenzi* (Giuseppe), Carlo Bombieri (Domestic, Commissioner).
Coro dell’Arena di Verona, Roberto Gabbiani (chorus master), Orchestra dell’Arena di Verona, Michele Spotti*/Francesco Ivan Ciampa (conductor)
Paul Curran (stage director), Juan Guillermo Nova (sets), Stefano Ciammitti (costumes), Fabio Barettin (lighting), Kyle Lang (choreography)
R. Feola (© Ennevi Foto)
Few operas possess the global currency of Verdi’s La traviata, and its prominence this summer at two of Europe’s most spectacular open‑air festivals—the Bregenzer Festspiele on Lake Constance and the Arena di Verona—was eloquent testimony to its enduring appeal. For its 103rd season, the Arena opened with a new production of Verdi’s perennial favourite, offering precisely the sort of grand‑scale theatrical extravaganza for which this vast Roman amphitheatre has become synonymous.
There was, however, an unexpected drama before the curtain had even risen. A violent storm had struck the Verona area only two days before the première, severely damaging elements of the new scenery and forcing the cancellation of the dress rehearsal. The technical staff of Fondazione Arena responded with exemplary efficiency, repairing and replacing the damaged structures in record time and allowing the opening night to proceed as scheduled. In a season inaugurated under the sign of spectacular excess, the true heroes of the evening were therefore, quite appropriately, the technicians whose ingenuity made the performance possible.
After two productions entrusted to the visionary imagination of Stefano Poda, Verona returned decisively to traditional grand‑opera aesthetics. The Scottish director Paul Curran, making his Arena debut, collaborated with set designer Juan Guillermo Nova, costume designer Stefano Ciammitti, lighting designer Fabio Barettin and choreographer Kyle Lang. Known for his relatively traditional stagings, such as his Der fliegende Holländer for Florence and La fanciulla del West for Bologna, Curran drew explicitly upon the Parisian world of the Moulin Rouge and, inevitably, upon Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge! (2001), whose twenty‑fifth anniversary was being celebrated this year and with which Curran had been associated during the early stages of the film’s development.
The connection with Luhrmann, however, remained largely pictorial. The windmill, the elephant, the can‑can and the general iconography of the Parisian cabaret were all present, but the film’s defining postmodern delirium—its chromatic saturation, anachronisms, pop‑cultural collisions and feverish visual imagination—was absent. Curran and Nova instead remained within the conventions of the traditional Arena spectacle, producing a truly lavish Traviata that fulfilled the amphitheatre’s appetite for scale without attempting to replicate Luhrmann’s radically revisionist idiom.
The first act unfolded against a monumental evocation of Montmartre, complete with the Moulin Rouge’s illuminated windmill and the famous stucco elephant that once stood in the establishment’s garden. The central space became a cabaret theatre, with Violetta and Alfredo’s encounter taking place amid can-can dancers, extravagant costumes and an army of extras. The visual echoes of Franco Zeffirelli’s legendary Arena productions were sometimes striking, extending even to the painted drops at the front of the stage and the inevitable shower of confetti. Yet Curran’s production was not merely a pastiche of Zeffirelli: it attempted to impose its own theatrical logic upon the immense machinery of the amphitheatre.
Flora’s party in Act II transferred the same aesthetic to the world of the Folies Bergère, with gaming tables, fountains, dancers, decorative foliage and vast numbers of extras. The result was certainly spectacular, although the sheer abundance of visual material occasionally became an end in itself. The massed ensembles were not always handled with sufficient discrimination, and the protagonists could become temporarily engulfed by the surrounding tumult. Even Lang’s lively choreography, replete with surprisingly overt LGBT themes, was sometimes swallowed by the sheer quantity of movement onstage. Filling the Arena merely for the sake of filling it may produce intoxication, but it does not necessarily illuminate Verdi’s drama.
The country house was more successful, despite its own monumental veranda of Art Nouveau glass and steel, while the final act provided the production’s most welcome transformation. The enormous stage suddenly contracted into a dark and claustrophobic room containing little more than Violetta’s bed and the window through which the light of her final morning entered. After the visual profusion of the preceding acts, the austerity of the final tableau restored the opera to its true dramatic centre: isolation, intimacy and the inexorable approach of death.
This contrast exposed the production’s fundamental tension. La traviata is, after all, an unusually concentrated opera: a bourgeois tragedy built upon intimate psychological conflict, whose action takes place largely in domestic interiors. Its musical architecture constantly alternates between the chamber‑like intimacy of private life and the brilliant orchestral expansiveness of public spectacle. The Arena, by its very nature, demands the opposite—scale, crowds and visual magnificence. Curran negotiated these conflicting imperatives with reasonable assurance, although the production did not always reconcile them completely.
Nevertheless, this was a highly effective piece of Arena theatre: sumptuous, immediately legible and calculated to appeal to an international summer audience. It offered a welcome alternative to the doll’s‑house aesthetic of some of Zeffirelli’s earlier Verona Traviatas while retaining the monumental visual language that has become almost inseparable from the amphitheatre’s identity.
Musically, Michele Spotti, conducting his second Arena season opening, demonstrated considerable gifts as a musical organiser and an unusually acute ear for orchestral detail. His reading paid particular attention to Violetta and to the psychological trajectory of her music. In the immense acoustic space of the Arena, where orchestral textures can easily become amorphous and distant, Spotti elicited an impressive degree of transparency. Inner lines emerged with unexpected clarity: cello counterpoints, incisive horn interventions and finely etched woodwind colours could all be discerned. Rather than reducing Verdi to a generic rhythmic accompaniment, Spotti revealed a score of considerable sophistication, at times recalling the refinement of early Romantic orchestral writing more than the conventional image of Verdi as purveyor of straightforward theatrical bombast.
His handling of the intimate passages was particularly finely wrought, while the public scenes possessed appropriate brilliance and momentum. Yet his tempi were occasionally too expansive, producing a degree of languor that threatened the dramatic pulse. “Amami, Alfredo”, taken at an especially relaxed pace, lost some of its visceral urgency. More troubling were the familiar cuts retained in the Verona tradition: the excision of the second stanza of “Ah, fors’è lui” and the cuts affecting the cabaletta structures of both Germonts. Such cuts are particularly unfortunate in an opera whose formal architecture is so carefully constructed.
The evening’s most remarkable interpreter was Rosa Feola as Violetta. Admired last year as Alice Ford in La Scala’s revival of Giorgio Strehler’s Falstaff, Feola again demonstrated that rare combination of vocal refinement and dramatic instinct that distinguishes a truly individual artist. She inhabited Violetta with an innate elegance, colouring the voice with delicacy and expressive warmth while never sacrificing its essential musical poise. This was a performance of uncommon sensitivity and intelligence: Feola seemed not merely to sing the role, but to inhabit it from within, wearing Violetta as naturally as a pair of gloves made expressly to measure.
Her instrument possessed a fresh, healthy sheen, formidable projection in the open air, an unusually firm middle register and incisive, cleanly articulated coloratura. More impressive still was her intelligence as a musical actress. Feola did not treat Violetta as a succession of vocal set pieces but traced a coherent psychological journey from the glittering frivolity of Act I through the emotional conflict of Act II to the desperate struggle between life and death in the final act.
Her acting was equally natural, wisely resisting the temptation to inflate every gesture for the benefit of the vast auditorium. Most impressive was her phrasing of the opera’s pivotal moments, from Act II’s tender “Amami, Alfredo! Amami quant’io t’amo” to the letter scene in Act III and the luminous “E strano... Cessarono gli spasmi del dolore”. Feola’s Violetta was vocally fresh, dramatically intelligent and already possessed of a distinct artistic personality. The ovation that greeted her at the conclusion of the performance was entirely deserved.
For several years, Enea Scala was an admirable rising tenor, endowed with good looks and a naturally pleasing voice of considerable power. In recent seasons, however, he has decisively graduated to the ranks of the major singers, as he demonstrated in Caterina Cornaro in Bergamo last November, Zelmira at last year’s Rossini Opera Festival in Pesaro, as well as Ermione in 2024 and Eduardo e Cristina in 2023. His once supple and remarkably malleable instrument has acquired considerably greater amplitude and heft, although the transformation has not been entirely without cost: the voice has also developed a pronounced metallic hardness, particularly at full volume, which can occasionally compromise its former tonal allure. Alfredo, fortunately, makes fewer extreme technical demands than the aforementioned Rossinian parts, and Scala brought to the role considerable vocal authority and professional assurance. Indeed, the part seemed particularly well suited to his present vocal profile. His Act II aria, “Lunge da lei... Dei miei bollenti spiriti”, was persuasively phrased, while his considerable histrionic gifts made him a convincing Alfredo, capturing with admirable directness the ardour, impetuosity and vulnerability of Verdi’s young lover.
Amazingly, the Arena di Verona had assembled three of today’s foremost Verdi baritones—Mongolia’s Amartuvshin Enkhbat, France’s Ludovic Tézier and Italy’s Luca Salsi—to alternate as Giorgio Germont. Admired recently as deeply moving Simon in Rome’s production of Simon Boccanegra, a delightfully comic yet profoundly human Sir John Falstaff in Vienna’s Falstaff, and a menacing Baron Scarpia in Parma’s Tosca, Salsi proved an outstanding Giorgio Germont. His sumptuous timbre, homogeneous emission and aristocratic command of the vocal line are ideally suited to Verdi, and he possesses the vocal authority one expects of a first-rate Verdi baritone.
There is, admittedly, a certain dryness to the voice, but this very quality can prove an asset in the portrayal of stern and uncompromising characters. Nowhere was this more telling than in his great duet with Violetta. Salsi initially exploited the grainier, drier side of his timbre to convey Germont’s severity and apparent lack of compassion, before gradually softening and shading the voice as the character’s humanity asserted itself. The transformation was achieved with remarkable subtlety and culminated in a genuinely moving conclusion to the duet. His “Di Provenza il mar, il suol” was equally finely shaped, its noble vocal line enriched by discreet yet telling expressive nuances.
The supporting cast was uniformly professional. The Arena Chorus, prepared by Roberto Gabbiani, once again demonstrated why it remains one of the company’s principal assets. Following a few less‑than‑clean attacks in the opening act, the ensemble grew steadily in confidence, contributing both vocal weight and theatrical animation to the large‑scale party scenes. Lang’s choreography likewise provided energetic support to the production’s visual conception.
The circa 20,000-capacity Arena was virtually full, and the response was warm throughout. Applause greeted the principal artists after individual numbers, while the technicians themselves received spontaneous recognition during the scene changes—a fitting tribute after their extraordinary efforts to rescue the production from the preceding storm. At the final curtain, Spotti, Salsi and Scala were warmly received, but the most emphatic ovation was reserved for Rosa Feola.
Curran’s Traviata may not have reinvented either Verdi or the Arena tradition, but it offered what the amphitheatre does best: a spectacle of considerable visual amplitude, immediately accessible and unapologetically grand. Its weaknesses lay precisely in that excess, when visual abundance overwhelmed dramatic purpose. Yet beneath the machinery, the confetti and the Moulin Rouge iconography, the evening found its centre in Feola’s remarkable Violetta and in Spotti’s unusually attentive orchestral reading. For all its conventionality, the production ultimately achieved the most elementary and perhaps most elusive objective of an Arena performance: it made the vastness of the theatre feel, at crucial moments, surprisingly intimate.
Ossama el Naggar
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