Anna's Chauffeur Speaks; The SF Chronicle Savages Her Violetta

The Examiner publishes (scroll halfway down the page) an email from Paul Ziller, the super who the other night in San Francisco played Anna's/Violetta's chauffeur in La Traviata. An excerpt:

I looked in the rear view mirror and whose face was it I saw...but Anna Netrebko's. I nearly swallowed my tongue. It was an out-of-body experience of sorts. Those now famous eyes were looking back at me (or, at least past me), and her beautiful rhinestone earrings and tiara shimmered with the light coming from the nearby stage lights. I felt like I was in an exotic fragrance commercial

Unfortunately Joshua Kosman, the "Chronicle" music critic, wasn't as smitten as this excitable nice young man:

The evening's shocker was the Violetta of soprano Anna Netrebko, a worrisome assemblage of technical problems and stagey mannerisms that came to life only in the opera's short final act.

...

Gone was the sleek, silvery tone that once coursed with thrilling precision through the most demanding vocal assignments. Gone, too, was the focus on emotional and dramatic detail that brought fresh insights to a range of roles.

In their place was a dark-hued, sluggish sound, deployed with laborious uncertainty and awkward breath control (I can't recall the last time I was so keenly aware of an opera singer's breathing - and no, it wasn't just the TB speaking). The glittery roulades of "Sempre libera" in Act 1, as Violetta decides to embrace the pleasures of the demimonde for good, sounded crude and approximate.

Then her singing -- not her acting -- apparently got better.

On the other hand, the dude from the San Jose Mercury News heard some "liquid amber" so a good night was had by almost all.