Tuesday, November 18, 2014

The Taming of the Gypsy

Bizet’s Carmen
Met Opera
October 28, 2014
Photo credit: Ken Howard / Met
Tonight revisiting Carmen, I was reminded why it’s such a blockbuster. With nine hundred and ninety two performances at the Met alone, Georges Bizet’s 1875 opera is immensely and effortlessly entertaining. It features wonderful music at every turn with a variety of different themes and Spanish-tinged melodies that are always fiery and pleasant to the ear. In terms of the plot, which is linear and very easy to follow, this is not an opera of nuance – dutiful, good-boy soldier falls for beautiful, free-spirited gypsy, who (maybe) loves him back (for a bit), drags him into an adventurous life of danger as an outlaw smuggler; soldier is not really made for this, but is crazy about his gypsy, while torn by remorse for not being close to his loving mother and not behaving like a good citizen; enter hot, free-spirited torero who whisks the beautiful gypsy away; soldier goes crazy with jealousy and stabs gypsy to death.

Photo credit: Met 
Although the story may be simple, the music is complex and multi-faceted and brings different themes alive with immediacy, power and expressiveness. Often times Bizet’s score switches the musical mood several times within a single scene to emphasize the various strands that are all going on at once so that in the span of only a few minutes the tone will change from celebratory to dangerous to loving, and then back to festive, really illustrating how the unity of the plot consists of a multiplicity of ideas that all work together beautifully.

Photo credit: Met
Young, passionate and energetic, Pablo Heras-Casado is the perfect conductor for Carmen, not the least because of his obvious Spanish sensibility, particularly evident in the opening of Act IV, which musically was one of the highlights of the evening. It is a fiery and breathtaking piece of music that conjures an intensely passionate mood in preparation for the emotional climax to come in the finale. Heras-Casado kept the whole opera moving at a brisk pace, distilling every nuance of the wonderful Bizet score. He really brought it to life for me like never before and made me realize that the music may actually be the true, and certainly the most complex, protagonist here.

Photo credit: Hioryuki Ito / NYT
Georgian mezzo Anita Rachvelishvili is a force of nature, a veritable stage animal. Her acting was fierce, aggressive and sensual, as a Carmen should be and maybe even more – the intensity of her passion when initiating intercourse with Don Jose on a table caused a lot of tableware to fall to the ground (which was a realistic yet distracting effect). The rawness of her acting contrasted somehow with her singing, which was surprisingly graceful, and fluid throughout, almost nonchalant, a bit lacking in the guttural, expressive intensity that one would expect from a Carmen. She did achieve peaks of tragic passion in Act IV’s final confrontation with Don Jose, actually sending some shivers down my spine. Rachvelishvili was incredibly mobile on stage and also a great dancer, particularly in Acts II and III, where really embodied the gypsy nature of her character. This singer’s very physical stage presence was evident when we discovered her in Price Igor last year, but she was even more striking in this Bizet role that seems to have become her signature part since her La Scala debut in 2009.


Photo credit: Ken Howard / Met
Soprano Anita Hartig was an impressive Micaela, the loving good girl tending to Don Jose’s sick mother. Her character is Gilda-like and Hartig conveyed it with an angelic purity and innocence while at the same time soaring and effortlessly filling the space more than any of her other colleagues on stage. She left me wanting to hear more from her and I will look forward to seeing her again in a leading role in the future. Bass Ildar Abdrazakov exuded charisma as Escamillo. His entrance in Act II was a showstopper and a pleasure for the eyes and the ears alike. No wonder Carmen dumps that moping Don Jose for this sexy toreador, really a no brainer, especially when Abdrazakov is singing the role! Tenor Aleksandrs Antonenko as Don Jose was passable once he warmed up a bit and as long as he avoided high notes. I am just not crazy about the sound of his voice, particularly in the higher register. Though his sound can be grating on the ears, when he is in the young, naive and in love stage of his early character development, he was easier to palate, especially in the last two acts of the opera when he grows more jaded and angry at the world.

Photo credit: Ken Howard / Met
Frasquita and Mercedes may be minor roles but Kiri Deonarine and Jennifer Johnson Cano did an excellent job in bringing these two gypsies to life with verve and lightheartedness, while at the same time being vocally very strong and displaying great acting skills, they both left me wishing to see more from their characters. The Met’s chorus was as usual excellent, with a special mention for the kids’ section that was particularly delightful and fresh.

Photo credit: Beatriz Schiller
Photo credit: Ken Howard / Met
Rob Howell’s sets were essential and raw, with a circular crumbly stone-like structure serving as backbone for most of the opera, complemented by gates surrounding the square (Act I), Pastia’s bar and dance floor (Act II), mountainous elements (Act III) and the street outside the plaza de toros (Act IV). The simple decadence of the sets made them somehow a-temporal in a very refreshing way. It seems like one of director Richard Eyre’s signature moves is to imbue his overtures with a little does of stage action (think of this year’s Nozze). Here he chose to have each act’s overture/prelude punctuated by a couple of dancers performing the different stages of Carmen and Don Jose’s love story, which was a nice touch, particularly with red lighting that emphasized the violence and passion flowing through the opera. The direction was all in all pretty straightforward, with some particularly effective ideas in Act IV. The parallel between Carmen as a force of nature who needs taming and the bull whom matador arrives in the parade to strike down is really pounded into the audience full force in this production:

C’est l’Espada, la fine lame,
celui qui vient terminer tout,
qui paraît à la fin du drame
et qui frappe le dernier coup!



As Escamillo enters in full regalia on his way to the bullring, the chorus sings a metatextual reflection of what happens in the final seconds of the drama. And the last image Eyre leaves us with is a split-frame glimpse of the corpse of Carmen on one side of the stage and her virtual mirror image in the cadaver of the bull that is revealed once the circular stage spins open and the bullring after the bullfight is brought into view. Like the sacrificial bull, Carmen has been laid low, her carefree toying with men’s emotions has back to haunt her. And the story spins full circle.

- Lei & Lui
Photo credit: Ken Howard / Met
Photo credit: Met  
Photo credit: Ken Howard / Met
Photo credit: Ken Howard / Met
Photo credit: Ken Howard / Met
Photo credit: Met 



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