Carmen Comp [Import]

I've been enjoying live-performance recordings lately that really draw you into the opera house and onto the stage. The image I had while listening to this performance was of soloists standing behind music stands turning the pages of their music.

I have no objections to Gheorghiu singing this role: generally it doesn't seem to strain her excessively in any part of her range. What I do object to is her habit of swooping all over the place and her use of vibrato and breathiness as a generalized all-purpose "intense" emotion, which shows little imagination and makes her words harder to understand (and they weren't that clear to begin with). She has pitch and articulation problems in her alternative aria and the séguedille. The coloratura in the Gypsy Song is approximate. In many places, she sounds uninvolved, rushing through things; in many places, she seems reluctant to reach the last note of a phrase, or to finish a word, it just sounds lazy. In the card game, the women scream the high notes, and Gheorghiu's low notes are pushed.

The end of the opera is atrocious, the whole thing is rushed, all the notes are screamed by Alagna and Gheorghiu. In a sudden burst of sadism, I started cheering them on to greater vocal self-mutilation. I guess that's what people mean by "contagious enthusiasm".

In her aria, Inva Mula is pretty good: she has the range, the appropriate emotions and the power (no, it doesn't have to sound like Minnie Mouse), and her words are intelligible enough. The last cannot be said of her singing elsewhere. She has major pronounciation problems: she skips many occlusive consonants, she doesn't phonate the ones you're supposed to phonate, and her "silent" E's sound like French U's. (She and Gheorghiu have similar vowel problems.) She shies away from nasal vowels, so once again, we have a Micaela who says that Carmen made a "woman" out of Don José instead of "a vile man". In her first scene, she pushes out her high notes as if she was afraid we won't hear them, and she is often sharp. In her first duet with José, she is full of gratuitous subito-crescendo-decrescendo mannerisms; she doesn't understand the art of French recitatives: "keep it simple".

Hampson is all wrong for the role: overall too light, this torero has no bollas; in his aria, his low notes are hollow and his high notes are spread and sharp. But he sings well and his proncounciation is very good.

Kudos to the other singers for pronounciation but not for their vocalizing.

Orchestral passages are great, but elsewhere the conducting is mechanical, nothing to write home about. This recording has no soul.

Nice packaging, lovely pictures, nice hairdos, but I think cigarette butts would have been more appropriate than red roses as background for the cover photo. Good sound (is that still a question in 2003?).