SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

Arguably the world’s most popular opera, Carmen seems to be the one I have been reviewing the most recently and with much the same casts as it happens. Last October at Covent Garden I saw Elīna Garanča and Roberto Alagna as Carmen and Don José and here they were again in this relay from New York.

Coincidentally too, the night before this transmission, the television channel BBC Four repeated a fascinating documentary by Christopher Nupen ‘Carmen – The Dream and The Destiny’ fist broadcast in 1973. Basically, the film followed the rehearsals for a new production of the opera in Hamburg starring a young and comfortably built Plácido Domingo as José. More interestingly, it also reminded us of the sad consequence of Bizet’s perceived first night failure: only three months later on 3 June 1875, the composer died desolate and disappointed aged just 36. He had invested too much of himself in what he believed to be his masterpiece but the tragedy he wrote was in fact too much for Paris’s Opéra Comique. Bizet’s own reported words during the first night included ‘I see a definitive flop … this time I am really lost’. In his own mind, Bizet considered that he had written ‘a work that is all clarity and life and full of colour and melody’ and this is now how the opera has come to be appreciated in the hundred years and more since the infamous first night. It is also true however – as the Nupen film concluded – that Bizet’s ‘fundamental idea of the true femme fatale who must destroy both herself and her lover, tends to be obscured by the attractiveness of her sexuality and the seductiveness of her music’.

I include this preamble because it has much significance to the Met’s new Richard Eyre production Carmen which was premièred as recently as New Year’s Eve. Elīna Garanča is the personification of Carmen de nos jours. She is suitably young, tall and her piercing blue-eyes against long black and extravagantly curly hair (a wig, I assume, as she is naturally blonde-haired) made her strikingly beautiful in the lingering close-ups of the Latvian mezzo. More importantly under the direction of one of Britain’s most celebrated stage directors, she embodied the bold, sexual self-confidence of the Gypsy ‘on heat’ without rehashing for the umpteenth time, the accreted stage action associated with the character. For her opening 'Habanera’ she is not sidling seductively around the stage, but instead is washing her shirt, and then her feet, in a bucket of water. Never throughout the demands of her performance do you see Garanča lose any sense of the character she is portraying and reveal the ‘mechanics’ of an opera performance. She is a consummate singer-actor and her nuanced tones fix attention on her rebelliousness, fickleness, passion and fatalism right through to her death at the hands of her rejected and desperate lover.

Blood and the bullring are the two important recurring features of this interesting new production. The first image seen is a jagged red streak down the middle of a black curtain. This reappears again on the elegant black dress Carmen wears in Act IV. Richard Eyre has updated the action to 1930s Seville during the Spanish Civil War; apparently this is to emphasize the characters' rebellion against a society that was sexually and politically repressive. Using the Met's turntable, Eyre and his set and costume designer, Rob Howell, give us basically two large sections of distressed masonry that can be moved with consummate fluidity to open up or shut down the stage area with the intention to keep the audience focused on the personal drama the principals are going through. Christopher Wheeldon contributes a very authentic flamenco-style number for the Act II tavern scene but for me his balletic duets performed by Martin Harvey and Maria Kowroski during the preludes to Acts I and III are misconceived and add nothing to telling the story of Carmen that is not somewhere already in the music.

One or two other points irked slightly though overall the production was a well-thought-through success. If the rather shabby looking cigarette girls could emerge from a hole in the ground only rather slowly on their first appearance in Act I how did they manage to rush out when the fighting took place later? There also didn’t seem to be much realistic smoking going on, despite the text’s reference to the girls being ‘never without their cigarettes’. Also, Gary Halvorson TV direction had the annoying habit of pulling back and missing significant moments such as the three just in Act I, when Don José picks up the flower Carmen stabs at him, subsequently kisses Micaëla and is later arrested. Additonally, the final image seemed to be over stating the obvious. Bizet’s Carmen was controversial in its time for having the ‘heroine’ die on stage but here Eyre, rather heavy-handedly, does not bring the curtain down on Don José kneeling beside Carmen's body but turns the set around to show us the inside of the arena where Escamillo is standing over a bull he has just killed.

Roberto Alagna, the only native French speaker among the principals, almost matches Garanča’s performance in being totally at ease with his role as Don José. He is however better, in terms of both acting and singing, from later on in Act II and thereafter with his smouldering passion, lust, rage and murderous jealously than when portraying the inhibited, inexperienced ‘mummy’s boy’ soldier. A little bit of gravel afflicted his voice before he floated the high B flat at the end of the ‘Flower Song’ but he had plenty of stamina for the angst and anger of the final scene.

As Don José’s rival the bullfighter Escamillo, the New Zealand-born Teddy Tahu Rhodes filled in for his ailing colleague, the Polish baritone Mariusz Kwiecien, at only a few hours notice. Tall, gangly and not particularly charismatic, it was difficult to discern what Carmen would see in him apart from his fame. His voice seemed to have a hollow quality and be rather tested by some of the phrases of his ‘Toreador Song’. As he is already scheduled to sing this role later in this run of performances however, it may be possible to see him to better effect then. The Italian soprano Barbara Frittoli brings warmth, exquisite phrasing and a purity of tone to her portrayal of Micaëla, the girl from Don José’s village, whose love for him never stands a chance once Carmen sets her cap at him and sadly perhaps, there is just a touch too much maturity in her voice and demeanour. The supporting cast is also particularly strong; bass Keith Miller is particularly effective as the arrogant Zuniga and Elizabeth Caballero and Sandra Piques Eddy are assured and engaging as Frasquita and Mercédès.

Playing a full part in the performance’s success is the conducting of Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the young French-Canadian Music Director of the Rotterdam Philharmonic, who was making his Met debut. He set a fast tempo from the very beginning but retained throughout a confident grasp of the work’s lyrical and dramatic elements. Everything built coherently to a gripping climax as the catastrophic nature of sexual desire reaped its victims. Apparently a tradition at the Met is the use, as at this performance, of Ernest Guiraud’s 1875 Vienna recitatives and this is an improvement on all the spoken dialogue that often holds up the drama … pace Bizet. Only about two lines of dialogue were heard in Act III and this approach could profitably be used more often.

With only one interval there was limited time for the backstage interviews that make these Met Live transmissions so informative. The always personable Renée Fleming was the host once again and her talks with all the principals, as well as, the choreographer and conductor shed some important light on what was seen. Elīna Garanča confirmed how Richard Eyre had indeed been seeking to ‘avoid the clichés’ in her character and Roberto Alagna said that he was also trying to ‘tell the truth’ as Don José - and how people have come these days to expect a quiet sustained B flat at the end of the ‘Flower Song’ despite Bizet only having written the pianissimo in the orchestral score. Barbara Frittoli explained that although Micaëla is indeed young and meek, she must also have been brave to leave the village to seek out Don José and Teddy Tahu Rhodes commented that Richard Eyre didn’t want Escamillo to be ‘too flamboyant’, relying instead on the people around him to adore him for what he is. Christopher Wheeldon described how the first prelude duet he choreographed, was about the characters’ fate and the second one was about their love. Yannick Nézet-Séguin mentioned the ‘great honour’ he felt in making his debut at the Met and how he always tries ‘to be sincere and share my love and passion for the music.’