Bizet : Carmen
The Chorus of Carmen
Orchestra of Scottish Opera
David Parry
This, my third production of Carmen in twelve months, was a revival of a 1999 Caurier/Leiser production that I must have seen (there's no good reason for me not to have), but cannot honestly recall. It has been revived once before, in 2006, but that one, I know I missed. Visually, it's a stark affair, no décor worth mentioning, minimal props, good lighting (if rather dim in Act 3) and mostly neutral period costumes until the last act when everyone has their Sunday best on. Dramatically, I wish I could remember how much of what I saw tonight was in the original, and how much has been added or modified either by the revival director or the singers, because there were a couple of things that did not quite sit comfortably with me.
Musically, it has been well prepared. Scottish Opera no longer has a permanent chorus, choristers are engaged as required, and Carmen requires a substantial chorus which has a good deal of work to do. All the more credit, therefore, to Chorus Master André Kellinghaus for the quality of the singing, the clarity of diction, and the cleanness of the French. For a production in which the great majority of the cast was Anglophone (and the Carmen a Lithuanian), the French, both sung and spoken, was a great deal better than I had expected - not perfect, but quite intelligible and rarely jarring. Whoever the language coach was certainly earned her/his salary too. This was the Opéra-Comique version of Carmen, with spoken dialogue rather than sung recitatives, and the dialogue was mostly quite passable.
The orchestra was uniformly excellent, under the expert baton of David Parry. The sound perhaps lacked that distinction in the winds that is such a strong characteristic of Bizet's music - the Act 3 Interlude is the most obvious example - but otherwise the playing was vital, colourful and bold, and I was a little surprised to register that at some point or other everyone, and I do mean everyone, fell out of step with them for brief passages here and there. Moralès, in the opening chorus, Carmen in the Seguedilla, both José and Micaëla in their Act 1 duet, and even the chorus, otherwise exemplary, in the opening of the last act. It's not as if this was the first night either, when such happenings are not uncommon. At any rate, it was unexpected of an experienced opera conductor like Parry, and makes me wonder if there was something else going on that I could not see that was causing the slippage.
It was, of course, unfortunate for tonight's Don José, Noah Stewart, that the last José I saw was Jonas Kaufmann, and only three months ago. It would have been unfair for any tenor. Stewart is the UK classical music media's latest darling, and there's certainly a good voice there, clarion bright and powerful enough for the role, but the tone production throughout the range is little uneven, thickening and thinning irregularly. He has a tendency to use a head-voice for soft high notes (the end of the Flower Song), and there was some real wear and tear showing at the end of Act 3, though he had recovered for the long final duet. What I did not get from him, however, was any real sense of the character, and I do not know if that is because of him, or because of the production. This José was a bit of a big lump, a piece of flotsam pushed around by the stream of events. That the character is out of his depth is certainly a legitimate approach, but there was no conviction to it here, and precious little chemistry with Justina Gringyte's Carmen.
Gringyte, on the other hand, displayed a fine, velvety mezzo with an excellent dynamic range, not afraid to reduce her tone to a seductive whisper one moment, then let it bloom easily the next. Her Carmen, however, seemed unduly petulant, a sulky teenager rather than an independently minded woman. I would have liked to be able to see her better during the Card Song - quite aside from the dim lighting, she sang it hunched over the cards on the floor, never really raising her head - because it's the only moment when you really see into Carmen, and once again, I do not know if this interpretation of the role was Gringyte's choice, or that of the director. Whichever it was, however, she assumed it without reservation, and gave an absorbing performance that only lacked that little extra spark with Stewart's José to make it really convincing.
Roland Wood put on plenty of swagger as Escamillo, but his vibrato was very intrusive and I found it hard to tolerate. There was a nice Micaëla from Nadine Livingston, and of the secondary roles Ellie Laugharne's clear-toned Frasquita caught my attention favourably.
[Next : 17th October]
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