Easter Festival - La Traviata (concert version)  

To be free, to go from joy to joy, to drown in the whirlpools of intoxication and voluptuousness... This is the credo of the divine Violetta Valéry, who lights up the wild Parisian evenings with her antics, where a certain wealthy and trendy elite like to let themselves go. The men lusted after her and were prepared to spend crazy amounts of money to parade on her arm and receive her favours. Despite all this attention, only one of them seems to mind the pallor that sometimes veils her beautiful face. His fiery declarations revive her hopes of a simple happiness that she had thought unattainable. But in a society of appearances and pretence, does a woman-object have the right to love and be loved?
In the early 1850s, Verdi was at the centre of a scandal when he took up with a former soprano who was considered unattractive because of her tumultuous past. To settle his score with the moral hypocrisy of the Italian bourgeoisie, in 1853 he adapted a successful play by Alexandre Dumas fils, The Lady of the Camellias, about the impossible love of a young man from a good family with a courtesan, and chose a provocative title for this new opera: La Traviata, literally ‘The Devoyed’. Despite the controversy, it quickly established itself as an iconic and timeless masterpiece, entrusted here to the dexterity of conductor Christoph Koncz.