Natalie Dessay prepares to take on the role of Violetta in this documentary about the staging of Verdi's masterwork at the Aix-en-Provence Festival in France.
Director: Philippe Béziat
Stars: Charles Castronovo, Natalie Dessay, Louis Langrée, Jean-François Sivadier.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2294917/
Read some praise for this somewhere, and I like Dessay a lot, so I thought I'd try it.
I missed the obvious fact that this is mostly in French. Interesting that the chorus is coached in English. (On the opera's credits, the chorus is listed as Estonian; the orchestra is the London Symphony O.)
This was not as interesting as I'd hoped. There was not much discussion of the big picture. Mostly micro-management of gestures/expressions, including for the chorus. I actually thought: has Dessay performed this role elsewhere, or is this her first crack at it; she seemed patient enough with the director. (Her IMDb credits show this as her first Traviata recording, but that means little.)
It was interesting to hear Dessay sing in non-operatic mode during rehearsal.
Sometimes we get the audio from either a different rehearsal moment or from the final performance. Sometimes we get dress/semi-dress rehearsal footage and/or performance footage spliced in with the raw rehearsal stuff. It's mildly interesting, but not consistent enough to make it really so. Y'know: here's the early rehearsal, here's dress, here's performance, especially for the 2 or 3 key scenes featured.
This should have been a double feature with the opera itself. I'm going to try to resist buying the opera (I have too many Traviatas already), but I think seeing this without that is very incomplete. On the other hand, if you have both, you'd almost need to queue them both up on 2 devices and play this scene on one then the other.
Rated 7.0 (98)
indie, dir. Beziat; 7
