A welcome new ‘Carmen’ at Covent Garden

Thank goodness the Royal Opera has created a new production of Carmen. The last one (by Barrie Kosky) was a failure. Despite one or two interesting ideas, it was lacking sexual allure, and absurdly left Carmen alive at the end. This new production by Damiano Michieletto is a welcome relief, again with an interesting idea, but this time injecting the necessary erotic attraction that draws Don José away from his family’s expectations and ultimately destroys him.

What informs Michieletto’s production is the (usually unseen) role of Don José’s mother. As he says, “without her the story would be very different”. It is she who sends the local village girl Michaëla to draw him back home and tell him she forgives him. Forgiveness for what? He is still with a platoon of soldiers serving in Seville and it is clear that Michaëla knows nothing of his recently aroused passion for the mercurial gypsy Carmen. It is she who in the final moments remains true to the destiny she revealed earlier in the fortune telling scene with her friends Frasquita and Mercédès. Carmen’s destiny is death.

For Don José she represents freedom, sex, and a love that is not confined by the rules of his home — by love for one’s family and the traditional role of the man. The sudden longing for independence and freedom, combined with Carmen’s rejection of him at the end, puts him over the edge.

The production deals with Don José’s internal conflict by having a tall female figure, dressed in black, appear silently on stage at moments of tension. This is his mother. In Act I, when Michaëla arrives from the village, a voice speaks, reading her letter urging him to get promotion, retire from the army and live nearby. Suddenly he is confused, but still mesmerised by the alluring gypsy. His way out is to kill her, but by that time he has already lost her.

When this opera premiered in Paris in 1875 at the Opéra-Comique, the audience started by being receptive but ended by taking against the rawness of the action. No such problems these days, and the murder of Carmen at the end was the most effective I have seen. Michieletto has pitched it perfectly, and as Carmen herself, the Russian mezzo Aigul Akhmetshina (a previous Jette Parker Young Artist at the Royal Opera) was superb. Earthy, teasing, her movements enticing and her voice cutting through the drama, determinedly hiding her own insecurities, she gave a great performance.

Piotr Beczała was wonderfully lyrical as the weak and confused Don José, his pleading in Act IV showing huge emotion, and the Ukrainian soprano Olga Kulchynska sang with vocal certainty as a beautifully demure yet strong Michaëla. As Carmen’s latest lover, the toreador Escamillo, the Lithuanian bass-baritone Kostas Smoriginas (in the time-honoured tradition of this role) initially looked better than he sounded — but made up for it later in the opera.

I loved the use of the children, following their first appearance in Act I, coming stage front to hold up cards spelling out the passage of time, such as “un mois plus tard” and “la nuit suivante”. This was a super production by Michieletto’s team; the lighting by Alessandro Carletti was especially outstanding. One barely noticed the changes from light to dark, but they were very substantial. With the chorus singing magnificently under the baton of Antonello Manacorda, Bizet’s music came over with huge lyrical power.

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