La Traviata, Alexandra Theatre, Birmingham

A gaunt but ethereal beauty

Pity the poor dame of the Camellias. A dose of antibiotics would have put all right; happily married, Violetta and Alfredo might have survived through the Dreyfus debacle and Debussy's Faune to toast Queen Victoria's jubilee. But then we would have been spared La Traviata, one of the 1850s trilogy that placed Verdi firmly among the greats.

Ellen Kent performs a valuable service. Her usual Moldovan troupe includes some of the strongest principal voices to be heard here outside London and Cardiff. In the provinces she arguably enlarges (rather than poaches) the audience for opera; and when she dives into areas of operatic dearth, her company's visits are welcomed like gold dust.

Now she has brought a new team, the Ukrainian National Opera of Odessa, a few versts down the dusty track from Kishinev. Two of her current leads, Elena Gherman (Violetta) and Petru Racovita (Germont senior), are from Moldova. Both are first-class singers, and they are backed by a much better-honed chorus and sensitive conducting from Yarema Skibinskiy, alternating with Vasyl Vasylenko.

Who knows what operas go down a bomb with Donbas miners, but our new ostpolitik allies have vim and vigour. Gherman is one of the best singing actresses around. Let her just open her mouth and pathos seems to enter every fibre. Gherman, vibrant in coloratura even when her natural mezzoish richness is stretched upwards, radiates personality and finds reserves in Violetta even where she's thinly drawn by Verdi's librettist, Piave.

You sense Gherman might have trod the boards in Ibsen with success. Each of her duets with Alfredo (here, a presentable if occasion- ally flattening tenor, Oleg Lykhach) was beautifully honed, thanks to Skibinskiy's gift of accompanying his singers to perfection with the finely attentive Odessa orchestra. The only hitch all evening was a moment's racing by the excellent women's chorus.

Racovita's Germont père, bent on prising his son away, arrives in powerful voice with the look of a grim Commendatore. His Act II encounter with Violetta was riveting. There are also surprises. Slight Slavic inflexions render his "Who has erased the land and sea of Provence from your heart?" a dead ringer for the great nationalistic aria in Dvorak's Jacobin. Exquisite sad violins suggest the riverbank of not so much Seine as Volga or Dnieper. A clutch of sad clusterings, tinged by clarinet then oboe, looks ahead decades to the mature Verdi of Falstaff. And Gherman's final optimistic flutter – "tanti ... pianti" – was heart-rending. "You appeared before me ethereal," sings Alfredo; this was a Tra-viata of gaunt but ethereal beauty.

Touring to 1 July. Details at www.ellenkent.com (01634 819141)