David McVicar’s new Scottish Opera production of La Traviata begins at the end.

As patrons enter the auditorium, the curtain bar is lowered to reveal Violetta Valéry’s Paris apartment deserted, the furniture underneath dust covers and auctioneers’ assistants making an inventory of her belongings.

The consumptive heroine of Verdi’s lyric tragedy is marked out for an early death in the prelude, whose music the composer reprises at the beginning of the final sickbed scene. McVicar takes this as his cue for a bleak, dark, memorialising Traviata. The opening dumb show has a bereft Alfredo pausing to pick up a stone in the graveyard, and when the curtain properly rises on Verdi’s Act I, the floor space is a fragment of a huge black-marble headstone, broken and bearing the inscription “Ici repose Violetta Val[éry]’”.

In his introductory note, the general director of Scottish Opera, Alex Reedijk, promises a “lavish production”, thanks to sponsorship (Dunard Fund), an appeal for cash and a co-production with Welsh National Opera and the Gran Teatre del Liceu, Barcelona. The most striking aspect of the design concept (presumably McVicar’s, executed by his regular collaborator Tanya McCallin) is its severity. The four scenes specify different locations in Piave’s libretto, but here all four are played out within the same basic set, subtly modified. The predominant colour is funereal black, with the stage “shrouded” in Stygian velvet curtains; but red and white, the colours of Violetta’s model, Dumas’s Lady of the Camellias, make their presence felt, subtly but potently.

At the Act I party, the hostess wears her red “unavailable for sex” corsage — a detail from the novel that Verdi and Piave sacrificed in the cause of decency and to placate the censors — while for her Act II true-love idyll, her house is swathed in the colour of innocence, her vases resplendent with white camellias. At Flora’s party, scarlet- and pink-dressed women suggest the sexual playground, with grisettes showing off their underwear (one of them, needless to say chez McVicar, is a man in drag) in a cancan rather than gypsy routine.

On the surface, McVicar has supplied Scottish Opera and co with a traditional production. McCallin’s costumes are not quite in period — McVicar updates from the 1850s to circa the Naughty Nineties — but they preserve a sense of the society in which Verdi lived and which he would recognise as the contemporary setting for his opera that the censors denied him at the Venice premiere in 1853 (when it was backdated to the reign of Louis XIV).

McVicar is one of the few internationally successful directors today who makes period settings both believable and resonant. In most by-the-book stagings of La Traviata, the parties look so sedate and the clientele so aristocratic, you wonder why Giorgio Germont is offended by his son keeping such dubious company. Not here. The men may be barons and marquises, but their (kept) women belong noticeably to lower classes, dressed on the cusp of tartily, showing off lots of plumptious cleavage and sitting on sofas, legs straddled, inviting all comers.

It is detail such as this that makes McVicar’s best work so watchable. He pays as much attention to the big ensemble pieces as he does to the principals’ scenes. He may not have any startlingly original ideas about La Traviata, but his staging looks fresh because he has rethought the characters, especially Alfredo, here a nerdy country boy who seems painfully out of place at a disreputable demimondaine party and baulks when asked to sing a drinking song.

It’s a pity, then, that McVicar’s work is undermined by the casting of Federico Lepre, a weedy Fenton in the company’s Falstaff last year and even less convincing in this more demanding role. Scottish Opera looks international and provincial at the same time, importing mediocre singers.

The company is luckier with its leading lady. The Italian soprano Carmen Giannattasio has the ingredients to make a first-rate Violetta: good looks, a real understanding of Verdi style and a native command of the text. She lacks armour-plated technique, however, and made a pig’s ear of the end of her Act I scena, ducking a tricky phrase and unadvisedly attempting an unwritten high E flat that horribly wasn’t one. After that hurdle, she settled down to some exquisite pianissimo singing in Acts II and III, but there were squawky, flapping high notes, too, and her pitch sagged on sustained phrases. Yet she understands Violetta’s complex psychology and, with steelier nerves and a bit more vocal polish, might be a formidable exponent of this notoriously difficult role.

Richard Zeller sings solidly — and a bit stolidly — as Father Germont, and it is one of the staging’s few faux pas that he is touchy-feelier than this moralistic old prig should be in the recrimination scene with his son.

Scottish Opera’s debuting conductor, Emmanuel Joel-Hornak, encouraged the orchestra to play too loudly — and coarsely — occasionally submerging the singers. The company also fields a vocally modest team of comprimarios who, thanks to McVicar, come alive as characters. The now part-time chorus, however, is terrific: their loyalty and commitment to a company that has treated them so shabbily is remarkable. As Scottish Opera recovers from its financial meltdown, slowly and steadily, McVicar’s Traviata should prove a banker.

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