Nadine Sierra’s Verdi at the Met

This morning I had the opportunity to catch up on a Great Performances at the Met program, which had first been broadcast by PBS on April 2, 2023. The offering was the first opera by Giuseppe Verdi that I came to know in its entirety, La Traviata. The encounter was due to the fact that I was preparing a series of programs for the campus radio station at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology devoted entirely to recordings of the conductor Arturo Toscanini. Before he moved to the United States, Toscanini had been Music Director at La Scala in Milan; so the recordings of Italian opera that he made in the United States could not have been informed by better experience.

One of the operas he recorded during his tenure as Music Director of the NBC Symphony Orchestra was La Traviata. When I first listened to that album, I was already familiar with tenor Jan Peerce and baritone Robert Merrill in the roles of Alfredo Germont and his father Giorgio, respectively. However, the “title role” of Violetta Valery provided me with my first encounter with soprano Licia Albanese. Now that I have the complete Arturo Toscanini Collection on CDs, Traviata remains one of the most-visited albums in the set.

Since my student days, I have had several opportunities to see this opera performed on the stage. Nevertheless, I wanted to view the PBS offering because the “title role” of Violetta Valery was sung by soprano Nadine Sierra. Like many of the “rising talent” that I encountered through San Francisco Opera, Nadine Sierra was an alumna of the Merola Opera Program, performing Adina in Gaetano Donizetti’s L’elisir d’ amore in the summer of 2010. She then became an Adler Fellow of the San Francisco Opera and was the beneficiary of an extended solo in the San Francisco Opera world premiere of Christopher Theofanidis’ Heart of a Soldier.

Nadine Sierra and Stephen Costello on one of Violetta and Alfredo’s more romantic moments (from the preview video on the PBS Great Performances Web page for this production)

It goes without saying that Traviata is a significant departure from the operas cited in that last paragraph. Nevertheless, the role of Violetta fit Sierra like a glove. Furthermore, the staging of her relationships with the Germont family could not have been better. This was particularly evident in how she handled her encounters with Giorgio (baritone Luca Salsi). Alfredo was sung by tenor Stephen Costello, who found just the right rhetorical devices for dealing with both Violetta and his father Giorgio.

Given that I have been both listening to and watching this opera since my undergraduate days, some might wonder why I have not had an “enough is enough” moment. The fact is that every director must choose his own approach to the personality traits for each of the three leading characters. Michael Mayer was particularly astute in establishing how Giorgio’s traits evolve as the plot unfolds. Each of the three principal characters has a “learning curve;” but, by the time the narrative is in its final stages, it is clear that Giorgio’s journey has the most to communicate to the audience! Salsi clearly seems to have appreciated this asset. We knew what to expect from Sierra and Costello, but Salsi’s interpretation of his role was the one that reverberated in memory!