`LA TRAVIATA' NEEDS A BIT MORE HEAT.

Byline: Reed Johnson Daily News Staff Writer

No control-freak Hollywood director ever has been more obsessively precise in picking a leading lady than Giuseppe Verdi. And in the case of ``La Traviata,'' the composer's behind-the-scenes plotting to get the tragic heroine of his dreams was practically Hitchcockian.

The lady in question, Verdi spelled out in frequent letters to his sponsors, should be a first-rate prima donna with ``looks, soul and a good stage presence.'' Not the toughest bill of goods, you'd think, but Verdi apparently found a lady of the, ah, proper proportions only in two or three top sopranos of his day.

Southern California native Carol Vaness has all those qualities in abundance and, as she displayed with last season's ``Il Trovatore,'' the knack of finding a solid emotional core in the most overripe of roles.

Those credentials, on paper, make her a smart choice for L.A. Opera's production of ``La Traviata,'' which arrived here last Sunday by way of the Washington Opera.

Yet here, Vaness registers as too wholesome and demure, too angelic, too altogether respectable for the business of playing a woman gone astray. The lukewarm chemistry between her and tenor Greg Fedderly keeps the story's political and psychological demons at bay so that, despite Marta Domingo's inspired direction and the Valentine's Day opening performance, this is a strangely unromantic production of Verdi's heart-thumping perennial.

Looking more matronly and modest than seems fitting in an unflattering black wig, Vaness brings a sweet-natured, self-sacrificing nobility to Violetta Valery, Verdi's willful Parisian ``courtesan'' whose ``decadent'' involvement with a naive young boy-toy brings down the wrath of the holier-than-thous.

Vaness communicates a kind of anguished purity, the inner torment of a closet saint who's been damned to eternal sensuality. She even gives Violetta's defiant declaration of ``Sempre libera'' (``Give me freedom'') a despairing tone, as if she were aware that her upcoming life of hedonistic pleasure with Alfredo (Fedderly) is going to cost her reputation and her life.

What's absent from the lovers' duets, and from the orchestra under Gabriele Ferro's bright conducting, is an undertow of fatal attraction. Though Fedderly's youthful brashness is convincing, when partnered with Vaness he seems more like a doting momma's boy than a defiant suitor. Consequently, the story's dangerous eroticism never bubbles to the surface.

Structurally, of course, ``La Traviata'' is a triangle, and it's left to another company regular, baritone Jorma Hynninen, to provide an effective masculine counterpoint as Alfredo's sadly reproving father Germont. Hynninen's beautifully delivered pleas to the wayward lovers are by far the production's most stirring moments.

Domingo and designer Giovanni Agostinucci make their biggest statement about 19th-century sexual hypocrisy - and it's a doozy - in their decision to turn Flora's mansion (where the fateful Act 2, Scene 2 party takes place) into a red-satin-walled bordello. It's a thoughtful wink at Verdi's inference that bourgeois marriage is itself a licensed form of prostitution. But the conceit is slightly undercut by the stagy foreplay on view in the second-floor salons.

Domingo delivers a final psychological thrust when the dying Violetta launches into her delirium, and we see the scythe of a passing Grim Reaper outside with the carnival revelers - a clever effect in a production that, ultimately, is a good deal more arousing visually than vocally.

THE FACTS

What: ``La Traviata''; in Italian with English supertitles.

Cast: Carol Vaness, Greg Fedderly, Jorma Hynninen, John Atkins, Malcolm MacKenzie, Jamie Offenbach, Charles Castronovo, Catherine Ireland and Megan Dey-Toth.

Behind the scenes: Directed by Marta Domingo. Conducted by Gabriele Ferro. Designed by Giovanni Agostinucci.

Where: Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, Music Center of Los Angeles County, 135 N. Grand Ave., downtown.

When: 7:30 Thursday, Sunday, Feb. 24 and March 3; 1 p.m. Feb. 27 and March 6.

Tickets: $25 to $137. Call [phone].

Our rating: Two and one half stars.

CAPTION(S):

Photo

Photo: Bass-baritone Jamie Offenbach joins soprano Carol Vaness onstage in L.A. Opera's production of Verdi's ``La Traviata.''