Take that, Franco Zeffirelli
Martin Bernheimer - Financial Times
5 janvier 2010

Richard Eyre’s brave new production of Carmen, which opened on New Year’s eve, ignores old clichés and empty-headed excesses. The heroine does not vamp, and her hands avoid her hips. Micaëla refuses to simper. Escamillo does not swagger. The chorus does not preen. The vistas are not crammed with irrelevant men, women, children and animals.

One applauds Eyre’s dark, tough and gritty sensibility, his canny use of Rob Howell’s semi-abstract decors, his ability to update the action without distorting it. But some of his innovations irk. The soldiers, busy in their barracks, describe a passing parade they cannot see. Carmen and her buddies muster a showbiz dance routine in the smugglers’ cave. Extraneous pas-de-deux indulgences (choreography by Christopher Wheeldon) are allowed to contradict the musico-dramatic pulse. In a tableau mort after Carmen’s murder, the set turns crimson and the turntable rotates to reveal the toreador frozen in triumph over a dead bull. Ah, symbolism.

Young Yannick Nézet-Séguin, who made a most auspicious debut in the pit, managed to sustain high-velocity verve without slighting introspection. He also enforced chamber-music sensitivity wherever possible and accompanied his singers with reassuring sympathy. Practicality no doubt demanded that he utilise Guiraud’s familiar recitatives, oddly augmented with tiny bits of authentic dialogue.

Carmen was supposed to be Angela Gheorghiu, but the anti-typecasting was temporarily abandoned when the diva chose not to share the stage with – or to be stabbed by – her estranged husband, Roberto Alagna. In her place came Elina Garanca, beautiful and smart, sexy and gutsy. Her slender mezzo-soprano turned sparse in descending lines (no chest-tones for her), and her pitch was sometimes suspect. Still, she won most hearts, flashing a devastating smile and magnetising attention even when standing still. Alagna exuded desperate pathos, phrased the duet with Micaëla exquisitely and tended to go sharp under pressure. He had the good taste to sing the “Flower Song” softly, but the bad luck to crack (twice) on the climactic B-flat. Barbara Frittoli introduced a strong Micaëla, Mariusz Kwiecien a weak Escamillo. ()

Martin Bernheimer