Royal Opera House: Carmen

Royal Opera House 2/6/24

Emmanuel Villaume conductor Vasilisa Berzhanskaya soprano, Jean-Francois Borras tenor, Andrei Kymach, baritone

After the excitement of ‘Andrea Chénier,’ ‘Carmen‘ was underwhelming .

My last ‘Carmen’ at Covent Garden was the infamous Barry Kosky production where Spain was represented by a bare terrace of stairs. It also had Brechtian touches of alienation as when Carmen was shot (!) At the end, as the music faded, she picked herself up, dusted herself down and walked off to the stage as if to say, “This isn’t real, you know!”

This new production by Damiano Michieletto also takes a non-traditional modernist approach to Carmen, setting it some time in the 1960s by the style of the van that the smugglers used as their transport. It could be described as a “Ford Transit Production” rather than the “football terrace production” of Barry Kosky! Does it work? Well, not for me. The crowd scenes looked like they could be set in a rundown seaside resort rather than a Spanish city and even the final scenes near the bull ring lacked much atmosphere. 

 The children in this production were given an enhanced role, riding around on bikes and holding up letters denoting the next scene. Although they got a sympathetic response from the audience, again it did little to evoke ‘Carmen.’

I reflected that the best recent ‘Carmen’ I’ve seen at Covent Garden was the first time I saw Jonas Kaufmann back in 2008. He was superb as a young Don Jose in a fairly traditional ‘Carmen’ production and I wonder why Covent Garden scrapped this. Also having seen the brilliant David McVicar production of ‘Andrea Chénier‘ the night before, which absolutely evokes the period of the French  revolution, you wonder why the compulsion to modernise? 

Sadly the singers in ‘Carmen‘ couldn’t compare well to the brilliance of the cast of ‘Andrea Chénier’ either. This was a second cast for Carmen which was being given a long run because ‘Carmen‘ is of course always good box office. Carmen was sung by young Russian soprano, Vasilisa Berzhanskaya, who is a decent singer, but the production and her dresses didn’t do her any favours. She appeared more as a cheap tart than a fiery gypsy! Don Jose was a fourth cast choice, Jean- Francois Borras, and again wasn’t very convincing as a soldier or as the lover of Carmen. Micaela was sung by English soprano, Gemma Summerfield, who was portrayed as a dowdy schoolteacher; again her very decent singing couldn’t overcome the poor production. Escamillo was sung by Andrei Kymach, the winner of the Cardiff Singer of the World in 2019. Again he sang decently but the production didn’t let him flourish as he should have. The conductor, Emmanuel Villaume, led the Covent Garden orchestra well but even they couldn’t overcome the problems of this production.

Of course my rather critical view was not shared by the audience who gave a warm response to the opera at the end. But it is the job of the critic to be critical and having seen many ‘Carmens’ over the years,  from Teresa Berganza in the 1960s to Jose Carreras and Agnes Baltsa in the 1970s, and of course Jonas Kaufmann in 2008 this ‘Carmen’ was to me underwhelming.