La Traviata at the Aotea Centre

Elvira Fatykhova is Violetta, the courtesan whose role in La Traviata is one of the most poignant in Giuseppe Verdi's operas.

Dmitry Bertman's La Traviata will doubtlessly ring a few changes on the Verdi classic when the NBR New Zealand Opera season opens tomorrow night at the Aotea Centre.

When this production debuted in Canada six years ago, Verdi's heroine was "more disco than salon" for one critic, who said there were boos mixed with the cheers during the curtain-calls. Not necessarily a bad thing, he concluded.

Bertman, a sad-eyed Russian, is the dynamo behind Moscow's Helikon Opera, Russia's alt. Bolshoi, a company that undertook the revival of Shostakovich's original Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk and introduced Berg's Lulu to Russian audiences.

"Our administration was worried about marketing the Berg," Bertman says, "but it sold out easily, mostly to young people. And when they took it to China it was another huge success.

"Penderecki was in the audience. He came backstage, kissed everyone, and said that we had staged a new Chinese revolution."

The other end of the spectrum came when he "did a Zeffirelli" for Turkish Opera, lacing the spectacle of Borodin's Prince Igor with a chorus of 400 and camels on stage.

Bertman says that too often the image of opera gets in the way of the audience it deserves.

"Sometimes when I go to the opera it is like a funeral. Everyone's in black, a few have flowers, and on stage is a museum that says, 'Please don't touch'."

Bertman, who counts productions of Gershwin's Of Thee I Sing and the Lerner/Loewe My Fair Lady alongside Carmen and Aida , feels that opera "needs to take on some the energy you see in rock concerts, in the musical, even the circus".

This is the sixth time Bertman has tackled La Traviata, starting with a production for Mannheim Opera in the 90s, "in which the women were dolls in a doll's house, manipulated by the men".

Bertman is cagey about revealing some of the unconventional touches in the Auckland Traviata, but his conception has the opera working on two levels, "reflecting the mixture of reality and fantasy that is in our lives today".

He lets slip that the maid Annina, who is often on the fringes of the action, is "a person caught in a world of fantasy, a little like Death itself, always near Violetta and always waiting".

Bertman, who finds opera one of the most erotic of all arts - "if we can't find an erotic experience in opera we are not doing it right" - is amused that so many of the great operas are based around women of somewhat loose virtue.

"La Traviata is the most beautiful opera about prostitution, with such wonderfully open music."

Yet Violetta's heroine status is inviolate.

Bertman's vision is more about how people feel alone in society and can't find somebody whom they can be close to.

"Violetta starts the opera in love with life, enjoying what she does. She's a queen. It is Alfredo who is the negative force that destroys all this.

"When she tries to go back to society, at Flora's ball, they don't want to take her back. Like Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady, she is completely alone. She is not with them and she is not with him."

The parallel is as charming as it is unexpected.

Although Bertman works throughout the world, he is happy living in Russia, which he says has come a long way since "those monstrous Soviet Union days with empty shops and nothing to eat".

His ultimate task is "knowing tradition and building something new on it", and he cites Tchaikovsky's The Queen of Spades and Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth as the two greatest Russian operas.

Asked where Boris Godunov figures and he says: "It is more local than the others. It is so Russian that it is not everyone who can really warm to it.

"Its strengths are historical and the nice music, but it doesn't necessarily touch the heart."

What: La Traviata
Where and when: Aotea Centre, tomorrow at 7.30pm; Sat 7.30pm; Mon 11.30am; Wed Sep 21 7.30pm & Sat Sep 24 7.30pm