Four stars for this production: an average between a full 5 stars for the vocal quality (certainly in the ladies’ parts) and a flattered 3 stars for the production.
I must admit I was expecting a lot of the radically new version of Bizet’s iconic “success de scandale” from 1875. Ever since some smart thinkers like Franz Marijnen or Peter Sellars radically changed course in the 80’s, some very enjoyable new productions have come to light. It makes me, as a matter of principle, excited about discovering fresh new ideas; certainly a “monstre sacrée” like Carmen had this coming for a long time. Expectations were highly strung following the trailers The Met showed lately, with an astounding Aigul Akhmetshina in the title role.
Carrie Cracknell’s production made my expectation turn into deception. I gradually became aware of the fact that this production, being announced as “woman friendly”, featuring Carmen as a victim instead as a “femme fatale”, is in fact a total cockup, sacrificed to a kind of misdirected wokeism.
As I said, I have no problem whatsoever with a director looking for fresh ideas. What I do have a problem with, is the discarding of the original dramaturgy. There is something like the lyrics, which are a given. And in expertly written operas, the musical dramaturgy mirrors this. In this case, the lyrics show us, emphatically so, that Carmen is an inveterate provocateur, eventually coming to grief with the limits of her luck and carrying the consequences. Victim of femicide? Come on. The premiss is quite clear: if you play with fire, you are bound to get burnt. When the production team starts reeling off nonsense: “Don José is in fact a psychopath, predestined by an unhappy childhood to become a murderer”, they become guilty of “Hineininterpretierung”. A very wise man once told me: “If it is not in there, you cannot dig it up”. Putting whatever in it to dig up what you need to serve your message, leads to bad theatre.
And so, the musical dramaturgy is blandly cast aside. Let us look at the final scene. It states quite explicitly in the music the parallel between the killing of the bull with the espada behind the scene and the killing of Carmen with a knife front stage. Whoa! Bullfighting is politically incorrect, so we transform Escamillo from a matador into a rodeo rider. And Carmen dies with the blow of a baseball bat. To hell with dramaturgy… The lyrics? Oh what, they don’t speak French here. Well, there is a translation in the seat before you. It’s true it’s a pity.
Another example of dramatic gibberish. The fact that Carmen seeks salvation with a gang of smugglers, is illustrative of her marginal social stance: her raised middle finger towards bourgeois society. She is, meanwhile, blindly loyal to her “God nor commandment” adage, completely ignoring the feelings of a poor chap who left everything behind at her pleasure, and whom she chucks over, shruggingly at first, flatly aggressively later on. In the original drama, this is shown as a process: challenging Don José by throwing a flower at him, spending a nice evening with friends at Lilas Pastia’s, with the smugglers present, and finally further and further away from civil society, in the mountains. No process to be found in this production. Instead, we see an irritating game of a truck and some pickups on American freeways. They are on the road all right; from where to where? Who cares…
The way the characters are directed is acceptable, and it shows some moments of intelligence. But they’re too rare to make up the production’s bungle.
Luckily the casting of this opera is of a rare quality – in the ladies’ parts especially. Aigul Akhmetshina, singing the title role, is 27 years old and she has been performing Carmen on the world’s leading stages for six years! We needn’t be surprised: she has a 28 karat voice and she acts like a consummate pro. A few issues in a technique that is not quite but practically perfect, and a French enunciation that could be improved cannot spoil the party. This young lady is top gun.
We did, of course, know Angel Blue. Her rendering of Micaëla is absolutely moving, besides being vocally astounding. I also noticed Sidney Mancasola’s Frasquita: quite convincing and dito professional.
Pjotr Beczała seemed to encounter some resistance from the part of Don José at first: a somewhat large vibrato in an ageing voice. But he made up for that. His moments of truth were rendered along his known standards: sharp but warm, fluent but beautifully articulated, a radiant top, and withheld when necessary.
Kyle Ketelsen’s Escamillo then. I never heard him sing live, but I wonder if his voice carries as it should. In the movie hall it sounded rather hollow, and not quite homogeneous; that resulted in over intonation. Mostly nicely done by the supporting parts.
Conductor Daniele Rustioni wasn’t able to convince me. I had to look for a balance between some nicely built and spicy pieces, like the chanson “Les tringles des sistres” with its stirring stringendo on the one hand, and pale, flatly dispatched ones like the habanera “L’amour est un oiseau rebelle” (which, luckily, didn’t seem to bother the singer) on the other. All in all: fifty-fifty. Opportunities have been missed.
Finally, a word about the choice for the version with sung recitatives. Originally, Carmen is an “opera-comique”, an opera for actors, and therefor with spoken dialogue. I suspect New York has chosen the safe option (as in Cherubini’s Medea, last season) to mask the somewhat exotic sounding French of most singers. I can’t understand why a world renowned house like The Met doesn’t invest in reliable language coaching. It’s true it’s a pity.
Conclusion: let Carmen be Carmen, no matter how tragic the character is. And certainly don’t force her into being a hand puppet of a kind of politically correct thinking that sells its intellectual honesty for a plate of lentil soup.
Sorry just seen you wrote cinema.
The spoken dialogue issue is tricky. Not just pronunciation, but projection. The MET auditorium is a big barn of a place. Most opera singers can't deliver effective honest dialogue anyway. (Apparently the first version of Nono's 'Al Gran Sole Carico d'Amore' included lots of dialogue, but Nono and stage director Juri Lijubimov found the singers incapable of it. Nono susequently set all of the dialogues to music.) Another issue, balance, if the dialogues were to be amplified and reverting to un-amplified singing.