Last year’s powerful Chorus pro Musica concert performance of Verdi’s early opera Macbeth had a lamentably small audience. This year’s CpM Verdi was his best-known and best-loved opera, La traviata ( " the lost woman " — based on the Alexandre Dumas play that is also the source of Greta Garbo’s Camille), and Jordan Hall was nearly sold out. Good thing, because music director Jeffrey Rink is about the best thing that’s happened to Verdi since James Levine. He assembles casts of capable and sometimes extraordinary singers, a first-rate orchestra, and, of course, a terrific chorus for operas in which the chorus plays an important role. So even without scenery and costumes, everyone involved puts on a great show.

La traviata is one of the first three operas (along with Il trovatore and Rigoletto) in which Verdi reached the pinnacle of his inspiration. It’s one of Verdi’s few really intimate operas — a love story that takes place in a purely social rather than political setting. No kings. No soldiers. No battles. Violetta is the worldly and successful courtesan suffering from TB, who finally falls in love, with tragic consequences. There isn’t a dull note. The great arias and duets — " Libiamo " (the drinking song), " Ah, fors è lui " ( " Maybe he’s the one " ) and " Sempre libera " ( " Always free " ), " Di Provenza il mar, il suol " ( " The sea and soil of Provence " ), " Addio del passato " ( " Farewell to the dreams of the past " ), " Parigi, o cara " ( " Paris, my darling " ) — are justly beloved, remembered, and hummed.

One doesn’t usually think of Traviata as an especially choral opera, yet it opens with a big party scene (the party seems especially big when you see some 70 people standing together on risers rather than gathering in groups in party clothes). The gambling scene has choruses of gypsies and matadors, which were wonderful to hear as pure music, without the distractions of dancers and other stage business. And Verdi makes Violetta’s death scene even more poignant by punctuating it with the sound of noisy revelers passing her window. The CpM chorus was obviously enjoying its multiple roles, and the singing was exemplary in technical accomplishment and vitality.

Rink brought back two singers who were in Macbeth from whom I was hoping to hear more. Baritone Jason Stearns’s singing in the title role of Macbeth impressed me more than his stagy posturing. As Giorgio Germont, Verdi’s most sympathetic villain (he wants Violetta to break off her affair with his son Alfredo because it would spoil his respectable daughter’s chance for a happy bourgeois marriage), Stearns again sang with beauty and warmth of tone. I just wish he’d stop leaning toward the other characters like a parody of an opera singer.

Last year, Armenian tenor Yeghishe Manucharyan sang the small part of Malcolm. This time he had the lead. I had high hopes for his Alfredo when he first entered. He couldn’t take his eyes off Violetta. I believed in his infatuation. But when he sang about how love was both a cross (croce) and a delight (delizia), he didn’t make them sound very different. Shacked up with Violetta in the second act, Alfredo sings of living in heaven. But Manucharyan had the same wounded-puppy look as he had later when Violetta left him. He’s got a wonderful natural tenor sound that is especially beautiful when he sings quietly. But he really needs to learn the difference between " croce " and " delizia. "

Soprano Marcie Ley, the Violetta, knew the difference. Like Manucharyan, she had never sung her role before. She certainly understood it. She looks a little too much like Nancy Kerrigan to be a convincing courtesan, but she at least looked happy as the party hostess, in her strapless gown and black choker with diamond (rhinestone?) clip, then conveyed her panic at the first sign of a cough. She sang " Sempre libera, " her rejection of true love, with gutsy determination and almost nailed the act-ending high E-flat Verdi never wrote. Her voice was pretty at low volume and harsh and wavery when she pushed. She gave a more competent performance than some Violettas I’ve heard at the Met. Yet she lacked what might be harder for her to learn, and what is the sine qua non of any Violetta: soul. We have to believe her suffering. I didn’t.

I believed Jeffrey Rink’s conducting, though. Sensitive, thoughtful, it was unhurried enough to allow every nuance of emotion to shine through, yet the pace never lagged. In the Prelude, we hear the soaring theme that Violetta will sing to Alfredo when she is leaving him: " Love me, Alfredo. Love me as much as I love you. " Rink led this as if it were less a look forward than a look back, a drifting back to us from an old tale, infused with both longing and nostalgia. It was the first of many such heartbreaking insights, and it was the soul of Rink’s achievement. He gave us Verdi.