Last Updated on April 8, 2024
Carmen at the Royal Opera House – Akmetshina Shines
There hasn’t been a new production of Carmen at the ROH since Barry Kosky’s 2018 Busby Berkeleyesque take on Bizet’s operatic juggernaut. Primarily played out on a huge staircase and situated in a fantasy world of Hollywood/Berlin 1930s decadence, Kosky’s production divided both critics and the audience. There’s another new production due at Glyndebourne this summer from award-winning Broadway director Diane Paulus, but the focus right now shifts to Covent Garden for tonight’s opening, Damiano Michieletto’s new production of Carmen, with Aigul Akmetshina in the title role and Piotr Beczala. as Don José.
The two leads, reprising the roles they had played in New York at The Metropolitan Opera, are heading a stellar cast. We enjoyed Michieletto’s Calabrian take on Cav and Pag and a delightful Don Pasquale set in a ‘shabby looking 60s motel’, but Carmen is a much more powerful presence in our cultural landscape, a combination of groundbreaking operatic ‘verismo’ set in the structural frame of ‘Opera Comique’, and infused with the spirit of the Zarzuela, the Spanish musical theatre that helped define the country’s national identity.
Carmen is in four acts, with the story taken from Prosper Mérimée’s novella, turned into a libretto written by Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy. Premiered in 1875 at the Opéra-Comique in Paris and not immediately successful, Bizet didn’t live long enough to see the opera become a central pillar of the repertoire. Set in the sultry heat of Seville, the opera’s narrative is constructed around the tragic love affair between Carmen, a gipsy, and Don José, a lower-ranking soldier. He is imprisoned for helping Carmen to escape incarceration for her part in a fight. On his release, she convinces the naïve soldier to run off with her and join a band of smugglers. The other two main protagonists are Don José’s childhood sweetheart Micaëla, an orphan who has been brought up by his mother and who acts as the maternal mouthpiece, and Escamillo, the local star bullfighter who has the hots for Carmen. She leaves Don José for Escamillo and the inevitable tragedy ensues.
Michieletto and set designer Paolo Fantin have located the drama in a deracinated fantasy 1970s world that’s a million miles away from the Andalusian elegance of Seville and the gloomy high-ceilinged grandeur of the city’s real tobacco factory. There are kids riding choppers and playing cowboys and Indians, the buildings are single-storey concrete or corrugated iron sheds. A listless, dusty yellow heat is generated by lighting designer Alessandro Carletti’s kinetic lighting array of a hundred parcans. It could be Spain, it could be Southern California – but really it’s opera design world – a transparent conceptual frame to give the production dramatic coherence, but lacking in the grittiness in texture and detail that made ‘The Car Man’ Matthew Bourne’s 1960s New York dance reinvention of the story, so potent.
Michieletto’s prime dramatic innovation is to integrate Don José’s mother as a central (mostly) non-speaking role into the drama. Caroline Lena Olsson floats around wraith-like in a black funeral veil shuffling a pack of tarot cards and creating an opposite pole of virtue and morality to the wayward Carmen. Don José never stands a chance, crushed between these two powerful women, in the end, he is always going to run to his mummy like a good Catholic boy, killing his chances with the wayward Carmen.
The issues that Carmen faces feel just as real. She is oppressed by her ethnicity, gender and class and can only assert herself through an oppositional stance to authority, whether it be state or patriarchal. Russian mezzo-soprano Aigul Akmetshina is sensational in the role and is the defining Carmen of her generation. Having won the Best Female Singer at the 2023 International Opera Awards, she has received plaudits for her take on the role at the Bayerische Staatsoper, Deutsche Oper Berlin and The Met, with Glyndebourne to come this summer. Initially decked out in designer Carla Teti’s viridian boiler suit, Akmetshina brings a masculine swagger to the part, swigging beer, fighting all comers and offering a profound sexual threat. Her voice has an earthy grain to it with a delicious clarity in its upper register; elegant in the habanera “L’amour est un oiseau rebelle” and bringing more of Jelly Roll Morton’s ‘Spanish tinge’ to the table in the seguidilla “Près des remparts de Séville” Akmetshina brings dramatic and vocal fireworks to this production.
Polish tenor Piotr Beczala is more than twice Akmetshina’s age and despite the difference creates a credible Don José with a strong emotional connection between the two lovers. His voice can veer more to the spinto than the lyric side as in his signature Act 2 aria “La fleur que tu m’as jétée”, and his acting is more restrained than Akmetshina, but while he may lack the youthful energy of his co-star there is enough passion in his performance to be more than satisfactory.
Lithuanian bass-baritone Kostas Smoriginas oozes macho cool in an alarmingly avocado-green suit as the bullfighter Escamillo, a role he is revisiting from the Barry Kosky production. He brings a gruff energy to the “Toreador Song” (“Votre toast, je peux vous le rendre”) that feels authentic and sexy.
Playing the dowdy Micaëla, Ukranian soprano Olga Kulchynska is impressive, bringing to life the pious character with a glorious lyric soprano voice that glistens beautifully in the duet “Parle-moi de ma mère!” with Don José.
Jette Parker Artists Sarah Dufresne and Gabriele Kupsyté sparkle as Carmen’s girlfriends Frasquita and Mercédès with their trio “Les tringles des sistres tintaient” being a vocal highlight as they dance in a hybrid flamenco-disco style. French baritone Pierre Doyen and French tenor Vincent Ordonneau were also entertaining as well as being vocally agile playing the smugglers Dancaïre and Remendado (“Nous avons en tête une affaire”) and having a couple of native French speakers in the production highlighted how difficult singing in the language is for most singers.
And Congolese bass Blaise Malaba brings physical heft and a warmth of tone to the role of the Captain Zuniga.
Conductor Antonello Manacorda gives a crisp and precise reading of the score, creating enough vitality to keep the drama flowing and with a fine ear for balancing the band with the vocals. However, in the first act, the chorus displayed a little raggedness. A special mention must go to the children of the Youth Opera Company who were well-drilled, vocally secure and charming.
This is a Carmen that is worth the price of the ticket to see Aigul Akmetshina at her peak. But there is plenty more in this production to seduce and entertain, and with Vasilisa Berzhanskaya and Brandon Jovanovich heading up the B cast it will be worth seeing twice.
5 April–31 May 2024
Royal Opera House
Bow Street,
London WC2E 9DD
MEGHAN says
Hello , The actress is Alfreda Ruth Adams not Caroline Lena Olsson x
Fiona Maclean says
Not according to the cast list – https://www.roh.org.uk/tickets-and-events/43/carmen-by-damiano-michieletto/cast-list/54719