His debut with the Canadian Opera Company offered the most thrilling sounds of the night. That angle comes through acutely in Arbus’s La traviata, and it’s thanks to the big get of the performance run: star tenor Matthew Polenzani as Alfredo Germont. On my more cynical days, I marvel at how La traviata is still true, at least when it comes to men dictating the lives of women. Verdi showed his progressive bent when he wrote La traviata, an opera that humanizes a sex worker and shows the infuriating societal burden that’s placed on women – specifically, those deemed not good enough to marry. Amid the delicious details in Riccardo Hernandez’s sets and Cait O’Connor’s costumes and puppets, our attention is always on the story of Alfredo and the courtesan Violetta. This production by Arin Arbus, co-produced with Houston Grand Opera and Lyric Opera of Chicago, last went up at the COC in 2015, and it ages well largely by staying out of its own way. Yet that’s what it is: one of opera’s near-perfect works, breaking years of silence with famous tunes and the kind of catharsis you can only get from Verdi. Originally due in April, 2020, the COC’s La traviata was never meant to serve as any sort of ceremonial return to the stage. Trite as it sounds, Canadian Opera Company music director Johannes Debus pulled magic out of the COC Orchestra on Saturday night, as the company opened its first live mainstage performance in two years. Surely, after the pandemic’s stretch of silence and anticipation, these opening bars wouldn’t actually have the magical quality that we imagine in our live-performance-starved minds.

These soft, fragile harmonies coming out of hushed strings are stunning when done right. There are few sounds as beautiful as the first bars of Verdi’s La traviata.

Metropolitan opera house la traviata