The dark but well-lit sets and costumes were sumptuous enough to make audiences feel they had been rewarded for their financial investment without simply being spectators at a chocolate box, bums-on-seats, crowd-pleaser. Celebrated director McVicar, with his designer Tanya McCallin, knows better than that. The flowing black drapes, the costumes of late 19th-century Paris, the flood of champagne, conveyed both the exuberance and elegance of this moralising and whoring society and its impending fin de siecle doom.

...Here is a director able and comfortable with his craft; from the servant sleeping curled at the bottom of Violetta's death bed to the gypsies at Flora's party with a risque Moulin Rouge-style routine.

Greek Soprano Myrtò Papatanasiu was a thrilling Violetta. In this role debut she was a convincing courtesan genuinely racked by the dilemma of choosing between worldly pleasure and love and then between her new-found happiness and self-sacrifice.

Papatanasiu is the linchpin of this production and she demonstrated she is a singer of intelligence and impressive technique, wrenching the emotion from the role and producing a towering Violetta.

Alfie Boe made a suitably immature Alfredo. He was nicely awkward and innocent in the first act and fiery and out of control in the second...

...Dario Solari received the approval of the first-night audience as a particularly aloof and dismissive Germont, not quite gaining our sympathy for his own dilemma. The chorus was in excellent form...