A Conversation With CORINNE WINTERS

Backstage at English National Opera, Edward Seckerson meets Corinne Winters – Violetta in Verdi’s La Traviata.

Peter Konwitschny’s highly filmic new staging of Verdi’s La Traviata is now an opera in four “pictures”: no interval, no grandstanding finales – not even Violetta’s show-stopping “Sempre libera” – but an intense, immediate, fast unfolding, and highly physical, drama in which Verdi’s original wish that his opera be a contemporary social statement is finally acknowledged. A week away from moving the show into the London Coliseum Edward Seckerson meets its leading lady – the young American soprano Corrine Winters – for an informal chat around how this already much talked about staging is shaping up. She herself used the prize money from one of several important awards she has garnered to fly to London to audition. In keeping with the staging she’s a thoroughly modern young performer, a thoroughly modern Violetta, who quotes Verdi on her Twitter account.

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