New star soprano Stacey Alleaume joins top ranks after a triumphant La Traviata
Australian soprano Stacey Alleaume has had a meteoric rise and has cemented her place in the top ranks of Australian Opera’s performers in her role in La Traviata.
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For a soprano we barely knew five years ago, Stacey Alleaume has had a meteoric rise – and it’s not hard to see why. The bubbly Australian-Mauritian singer with the warm, expressive voice has cemented her place in the top ranks of Australian Opera’s performers.
Her performance as the tragic courtesan Violetta in Verdi’s La Traviata, staged on Sydney Harbour, was a standout and marks a high point in her career so far.
Yet it was only in 2016 that her talent was truly recognised, when she received the Dame Joan Sutherland Scholarship for outstanding operatic talent and joined the Moffatt Oxenbould Young Artist Program at Opera Australia.
In her first year as a young artist she made three role debuts at the Opera House: Micaela in Carmen, Leila in The Pearl Fishers and Alexandra Mason in The Eighth Wonder.
The role she always coveted, though, was that of Violetta, the consumptive Paris prostitute who abandons her old life for love, only to end up abandoning her lover.
CHANDELIER
So, there we sit, fruit bats chittering above, the sounds of waves and passing boats, the stunning backdrop of the harbour and the spectacular, tilted set, surmounted by a 3.5-tonne chandelier measuring an incredible 9m wide by 9m tall.
The chandelier is suspended from a crane, which can raise, lower and swing the 10,000 crystals below, including the tiny section which will contain the star of the show, lifting her gently as she tries to suppress her well-known fear of falling.
From the moment the lights go on, Alleaume dominates the production, vivid red dress aswirl, voice on full power … and so Verdi’s probably most satisfying opera plays out.
Her diction and phrasing, her vocal control and that mysterious hard-to-define quality that requires emotional connection are all deployed to great effect.
Nowhere is this more obvious than when she is hoisted aloft to sing that equally towering E-flat at the conclusion of Sempre Libera in Act I.
Slightly less satisfying is Kosovo-born tenor Rame Lahaj, although it may well have been the over-amped sound that provided some subtle distortion to an otherwise engaging voice. Playing Alfredo, Violetta’s lover, he certainly looked the part and seemed to find no trouble in the softer moments.
GRAVITAS
As with Alleaume, 2016 was a seminal year for Lahaj, the fifth of eight children. That year he was a prize winner in Placido Domingo’s Operalia competition.
Michael Honeyman, as Alfredo’s father, Giorgio, combined gravitas and a soulful baritone in a role pivotal to the plot, requiring him to persuade Violetta to abandon Alfredo because the scandal would ruin his daughter’s marriage prospects.
Another baritone, Alexander Sefton, played the jealous Baron Douphol with brooding menace.
Brian Castles-Onion conducted with his customary rigour and Brian Thomson’s set, with its neon-lit background of the Paris cityscape, proved an eye-catching backdrop to Shannon Burns’s fast-action choreography.
DETAILS
●OPERA La Traviata
●STARS Stacey Alleaume, Rame Lahaj, Michael Honeyman
●AT Mrs Macquarie’s Steps
●UNTIL April 25
●BOOKINGS 9250 7777, www.sydneyoperahouse.com
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