Carmen - Opera Holland Park, 2 June 2010
Just about every last skirt-flicking, thigh-slapping cliché in the book is packed into Opera Holland Park's new but very traditional Carmen. It may not cast a radically fresh light on the old chestnut, yet it rarely feels tired or predictable in the way Francesca Zambello's overcooked Covent Garden production does.
Carmen - Royal Opera House, 6 October 2009
The sizzle may have fizzled from Roberto Alagna's marriage, but he can still hot it up on stage. The chemistry between his Don José and Elina Garanča's Carmen is the main thing going for this otherwise tepid revival of Francesca Zambello's wannabe-West End extravaganza. Despite all the fussy, overpopulated action and assorted live animals Zambello packs between the curvaceous terracotta walls of Tanya McCallin's sets, this Carmen only really takes off when the two of them are together.
Without resorting to the usual strutting heroics seen in this role, Roberto offers a rough-edged but remarkably subtle portrayal of a dutiful soldier flipped from upright to horizontal by his obsessive passion for the stunning Garanča. He's neither as hawt nor as thrilling as Jonas Kaufmann (can't wait to catch him in La Scala's prima live on the big screen) was a couple of years back but then who is?
Garanča is more problematical. Carmen needs a bit of dirt under her fingernails, and no, an elegant smudge of brown greasepaint is not the same thing. Her agile, honeyed voice is elegance personified; there's little to suggest an earthy gypsy heart beating beneath.
She squirmed awkwardly through the first act, dry-humping everything in Zambello's overstuffed Spanish square from the horse trough to the village idiot like a randy Yorkshire Terrier. Fortunately the matadors didn't turn up till the last act, or she'd have been picking sequins out of her ladybits for weeks. But by this time she's swapped her thigh rubbing and bosom heaving for a more refined life as Escamillo's escort. Her transformation was maybe too complete - I wanted to hear the coarse gypsy beneath the buttoned exterior - but the final showdown with Don José was compelling stuff.
The rest of the cast were underwhelming. Ildebrando D'Arcangelo's Escamillo was even less animated than the docile horse he made his entrance on. Liping Zhang's Micaëla was underplayed. Only Eri Nakamura's lively Frasquita made any impact. Bertrand de Billy held things together, no more, in the pit.
***** lots more photos over page ******
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Barely a week into the new season at Covent Garden, and already we're being asked to whip out our Amexes again, this time for November to March productions. Booking opens this week for those who've paid for the privilege, and next month for the common herd.
Rolando Villazón fights through miles of curtain fabric to reprise his Covent Garden debut role in Les Contes d'Hoffmann. Antonio Pappano conducts the elaborate John Schlesinger production, inching ever closer to its sell-by date. Ekaterina Lekhina (Olympia) is a new name to me, but Gidon Saks, Kristine Jepson and Christine Rice promise sturdy support (photo: Clive Barda).
Rolando also submits to a live interview on 10 November. Space is limited, so early booking advised.
The other star vehicle of the season is a new Tim Albery production of Der fliegende Holländer with (cancelitis permitting) Bryn Terfel in the title role. Anja Kampe makes an overdue ROH debut as Senta. Tickets will be restricted to two per customer for this one.
Britten's The Beggar's Opera pops up in the Linbury Studio. The new production by Justin Way (not by conductor Richard Hickox as the website currently claims - there are limits to his talents) is likely to be popular, so again, early booking advised. The excellent and underused Tom Randle is Macheath.
Also to the Linbury comes the long-overdue London debut of George Benjamin's highly-praised ("the most important new opera of the past 25 years") mini-opera Into the Little Hill , coupled with Harrison Birtwistle's Down by the Greenwood Side. The cast includes Susan Bickley and Claire Booth.
The brilliant Willy Decker production of Korngold's Die tote Stadt that I caught in Vienna finally makes its way to London. Unfortunately Klaus Florian Vogt and Angela Denoke aren't coming with it, but Stephen Gould and Nadja Michael should be a more than passable substitute. And there's the bonus of Gerald Finley in the smaller role of Frank.
David McVicar's t1ts'n'todgers Rigoletto returns with indecent haste. Francesco Meli, Leo Nucci, Ekaterina Siurina and Kurt Rydl are amongst the few cast members who get to keep their clothes on.
Elektra isn't illuminated by Charles Edwards's jumbled production, but with Mark Elder in the pit and a cast that includes Susan Bullock, Anne Schwanewilms, Jane Henschel and Johan Reuter it should at least push some musical buttons.
Even I can't get excited about yet another Turandot revival, but include it for the sake of completeness.
On the ballet side, I have to recommend the triple bill The Seven Deadly Sins / Carmen / DGV: Danse à grande vitesse, especially for the first of these and its wonderful music. Chanteuse Martha Wainwright returns to sing Weill's evocative music, and Zenaida Yanowsky is her dancing doppelganger (photo: John Ross).
ENO's recent Carmen will be screened online on the BBC Radio 3 website for a week, starting tomorrow, 3 November, at 6.30.
The streaming will be directed by Sally Potter, who also directed the production itself (to mixed reviews, though like most people I've spoken to, it clicked my castanets).
It's the first time either Radio 3 or ENO have streamed an opera online.
And it's also, as far as I know, the first time you'll be able to watch a whole opera from the performers' perspective (or indeed check out their a$$3$ in detail - who's gonna pack out with their crack out?) -- you can opt to view the performance either conventionally from the audience side, or from a unique backstage angle.
Carmen (Dress Rehearsal) - ENO, 26 September 2007
Articles like The CCTV Carmen and snippets dangled on the ENO's Carmen website warned that director Sally Potter would be abandoning the traditional cigars'n'castanets approach. So I wasn't surprised at the opening set - gigantic front-projected cctv images fade to reveal a portakabin in front of a dark curved marble wall, implying some unspecified menace lurking behind.
The portakabin holds the security guards that Potter has substituted for Bizet's soldiers. Carmen and the other women work in some unlabelled drudgery behind the wall, but their slapper heels and minis give a hint. The street urchins of the original become child jeebus-freaks and breakdancers - you get the picture. Only toreador Escamillo is spared a recasting. In this dark world, cruelty and violence seem inevitable.
The sets are strikingly simple and creatively lit, coherence lent by their clean lined geometry and rippled surfaces. The second act is set in a blue-lit chrome cocktail bar, the third on a covered bridge suspended over the stage, and the last outside the curved wall of the bull ring (cue beery British tourists exclaiming 'it's bloody hot here'). Traditionalists will be pleased to note there's no knicker-flashing, camouflage netting, etc - Potter is out to illuminate, not to shock.
Movement and blocking are economically choreographed. Even when there's a crowd on stage, it never looks cluttered. That is, until the tango and hip hop dancers pop up. Gifted with these amazingly skilled performers, it seems as if Potter felt obliged to include them in nearly every scene. Sometimes it works, sometimes, despite their breathtaking talent, they're a bit of a distraction. As is the gratuitous dog led across the stage by a security guard in the third act.
The ENO's English language-only policy works to Potter's advantage, allowing the libretto to be shoehorned into the production concept by a very free translation. This is really the only area where she's taken significant liberties - despite the relocation and modernisation, the characterisation and narrative are entirely recognisable.
I'm guessing the translation caused a lot of headaches. It still feels unfinished and clumsy in places. Disparities between the sung text and the surtitles hint that it must have been revised up to the last minute. Incidentally and disappointingly, the surtitles prove vital here for comprehending many of the singers. This is not the first ENO production where this has been a problem, and it's something they should really make more of an effort to address. Most of the compelling reasons for staging operas in English evaporate when you can't understand a bleeding word.
The ENO orchestra just keep getting better. They were on top form here, with a perfectly judged (but perhaps controversial) degree of Anglo-Saxon restraint from Edward Gardner in the pit matching the low key of the production.
It's not fair to make final judgments on singers based on a dress rehearsal, but it seems the casting choices are good ones, and there were no real disappointments. Carmen, poor Alice Coote, seemed still to be suffering from the virus which rendered her voiceless last week, and wisely held back here to save herself for the full performances. Whether she can bring the sensuality and passion the role demands remains to be seen - her reading here was opaque and subdued, making her switches of affection seem more imposed than selected.
The clean, accurate singing of Julian Gavin as Don José had a simple dignity, even if his final descent into madness and murder was too restrained to convince. The splendidly beehived Elena Xanthoudakis (Frasquita) and Fiona Murphy (Mercedes) were memorable despite the shortness of their parts.
This isn't a traditional Carmen by any means, but it's a recognisable one, even without the usual cheese topping.
If you're booking tickets, sight lines are pretty good all round, and you won't miss any principal action wherever you sit, just a little of the top of the sets from higher up.
Chamber Orchestra of Europe/Thomas Ades/Toby Spence - Usher Hall, Edinburgh, 14 August 2007
Edinburgh International Festival
Tonight's frenchy programme covered 300 years of music from fabuleux to fromage, though in the event it became hard to tell which was which.
The venerable Rameau was the starter. I've always found it hard to muster up the same enthusiasm for Rameau as I have for Couperin, and I couldn't help wondering if Thomas Ades and the COE felt the same. They exhumed the corpse of the overture from Les Indes Galantes but failed to breathe any life into it. It was as English as steamed pudding and just as soggy.
Ades's own Three Studies from Couperin surprisingly failed to pick up the pace, lacking the sparkle and drive of the UK premiere (Ades with the COE again) just four months ago. The scoring is intriguing, but was obscured by an odd dynamic balance, perhaps intentional. Whatever, it failed to dazzle in the way his other work has.
The shift into top gear finally came with Berlioz's Les Nuits d'Été and Toby Spence. Spence began tentatively and selected a different tempo from the orchestra for the opening Villanelle. This was something Ades failed to control, and a problem that re-occured in the final L'Île Inconnue.
However in the second song, Le Spectre de la Rose, both singer and orchestra finally blossomed. Toby Spence has all the basics and more - a fine ringing tone, secure notes, immaculate breath control and terrific projection. When he put it all together, the results were impressive. Although nerves crept in a couple more times, most noticeably at the start of Sur les Lagunes, there were more moments of pure gorgeousness. L'Absence in particular, pickily steered by Ades, was perfect in every way.
The animation that the orchestra gathered for the Berlioz returned after the interval for Ravel's Le Tombeau de Couperin. Ravel's arrangement is characteristically full of colour and detail, every inch of his canvas filled. Although this is at heart a memorial piece, it's also full of grace, wit and optimism, and the COE brought it exuberantly to life.
The closer, Bizet's Symphony in C, continued in this vein. Written when he was just 17, it has all the naive optimism of youth. This adorable froth is derivative, but Bizet pinched so many different ideas (mostly from Gounod) it's never boring. The COE made it crisp and light as a mille-feuille, but never over-sugared, a surprisingly satisfying ending to the evening. It came as a surprise that Ades could pull more out of Bizet (Bizet!) than his own work but sometimes these things just happen, who knows why.
(No photos tonight - I was personally and firmly informed that this means me:)
English National Opera kick off their season at the end of September with a new Carmen, film director Sally Potter's first venture into opera production. With fifteen performances scheduled, they must be hoping for a warhorse+moviemaker hit on the scale of Anthony Minghella's Madam Butterfly.
The cast includes the fabulous Alice Coote and tenor Julian Gavin, currently impressing in OHP's L'Amore dei Tre Re. And tango legend Pablo Verón, star of Potter's film The Tango Lesson, will provide the choreography.
The most interesting thing to appear at this stage is the Carmen mini-site which ENO have cooked up to provide behind-the-scenes info. There's not a huge amount on there yet, but with blogs, videos, and a production diary it looks as if it has the potential to develop into more than just a bland marketing tool.
It already includes a hint from Sally Potter that her vision may ruffle conservative feathers - "a potentially radical approach cannot possibly harm it".
And she circumspectly reveals "various dramas have erupted about the translation of the libretto", which has already been "a year-long adventure". (Reading between the lines is shaping up to provide some of the best entertainment).
Even if they just stick to the nuts and bolts of how a production is put together, it'll be an education. If they have the time to keep the site updated and the guts not to over-sanitise, it could be fascinating.
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