Bizet, Georges: Carmen

First and worst, I just can't get past von Otter's nasty portrayal of Carmen. She comes across as lewd rather than sexy; cold rather than hot. Her face is continually contorted in either a leer, a sneer, general nastiness or even downright viciousness. Can a face ruin a whole opera for a viewer, then? In a live performance, I doubt it; but on a DVD, full of close-ups, the answer is yes. The whole Carmen tale depends on her being an irresistible, sizzlingly desirable woman. So if the star of the show portrays her as cold and unattractive, even not so much in looks as in expression, then it's hard to get caught up in the story. And von Otter has problems with the Habanera which bother me, as well; her ill-timed pauses for breath disrupt the beautiful fluidity of the aria.

Second, Haddock is just too round-faced and pudgy for the role of the tormented Basque, Don Jose. He's not a bad singer or actor, but I just couldn't buy it.

Third, some of the sets are so cramped as to be claustrophobic. How can we believe we are in a sunny square in Seville when everyone is squeezed behind fences? And must the children bang on the bars? I couldn't wait for them to get off the stage!

Fourth, the updating of the libretto and some of the actions onstage, seemingly done to make it more explicitly sexual, were turn-offs rather than turn-ons for me.

For these reasons I can't recommend this Carmen at all. But I still had to give it 2 stars because of the London Philharmonic Orchestra, in its usual glorious form here, and for Lisa Milne, who gives a moving performance as Micaela. The chorus (not the children's chorus) is very good, and Naouri (Escamillo) is not bad.

But since Carmen herself is almost everything in this opera, I can't give it more than 2 stars despite these good things. I am giving my copy to the library & will stick with my other 3 DVD Carmens: Covent Garden, the Met, and the film version with Placido Domingo. Though none of these is perfect, they each have a lot more to offer than this one, so they are the ones I'd recommend to other Carmen lovers -- at least until that 100% ideal Carmen of each of our imaginations comes along.

Von Otter remains in character throughout, singing to the characters on the stage, rather than to the audience, as so many singers do. This is both a good introduction to Carmen, in that it stays true to the story and faithful in its performance. It is also a fantastic Carmen for those who think they know Carmen--that there's nothing more to add to it. Indeed, there is: This Carmen will knock your socks off. She is involved in all the action on stage, reacting to all the other characters. We may have thought we knew Carmen, but Von Otter shows us we hadn't seen nothin' yet.

The one negative I found in this production was the fault of the sound engineers. Sometimes I had to turn up the volume to hear some of the singers. Yet, considering the overall impression of the performance, this was a fault which was not intrusive. There were several good extras in this DVD set, including a tour of Glyndebourne Gardens, a primer on staging fights in operas (the difficulties of singing while wrestling), and a feature on how the costumes were made and chosen. There is also an illustrated synopsis, which makes it easy to introduce the story to new viewers.

For those who enjoy watching conductors, you're in for a treat with this Carmen. Phillipe Jordan conducts with almost incredible bombast and dramatic flair--you'd swear he might spear his other hand with the sword-thrusts of his baton. It might be out of place elsewhere, but it seems strikingly appropriate in the epitome of drama: Carmen.

I've enjoyed lots of performances of Carmen, but if I could see just one Carmen production, this would clearly be the one. It won't disappoint you.

To begin with, forget about the classic dark-haired and -eyed castanets and peineta-clad cliché we've been seeing since time immemorial, as regards the Carmen character, and forget also about any misgivings you might have had on this hitherto often called "swedish ice queen" taking on a rÃ'le so many supposedly "warmer-blooded" singers have so successfully brought on stage since the work saw the light over a century ago. What you have here is a fiery red-haired, blue-eyed, erotically super-charged whirlwind of a woman, on whom the world is centred since the very first moment we see her bursting on the upper part of the stage with a sonorous whistle. Von Otter is not only physically stunning to look at throughout, she'll also amaze you vocally and absolutely reinvents the character, a Carmen wholly of her own. I guess David McVicar, the enfant terrible of theatrical stages both sides of the Atlantic, has had his fair share in this rethinking of the character, but I doubt he'd been so successful had he had any other singer at hand.

The other singers are no less good. I've read some complaints on Naouri's alleged aloofness as a signature of his Escamillo, to me he assumes dead-centre the characteristic pose and attitude any successful spanish bullfighter worth his salt will assume once his hitting it big-time, he really seems to know how a successful spanish bullfighter ought to behave. And he ends up thus being a truly superior impersonator of the rÃ'le, impeccable also from the vocal side. The Don José is also very well characterised and sung, Haddock not only conveys the character's indecision, on one side longing for the world he left behind in his home town in Navarre and on the other this lustful, lascivous temptation of a new world Carmen offers for him to dip into. Micaela is proposed here as some sort of very proper and petite-bourgeois or middle class woman, somewhat past her best years and on her way to becoming some sort of spinster, a sincere and good-hearted human being but in the end the loser, the woman left behind by perhaps her own doing or as a consequence of her conventions, as the spanish saying goes, "left over to dress up images in the local church". You may prefer other impersonations that show her as a pure soul ready to sacrifice herself for the man she's loved for so long, but I'm perfectly ready to buy this variant. The other supporting rÃ'les are well taken, the chorus work very well, even the kids who so noisily mock the troops' changing of the guards in the first act.

The work is given in its original, Opéra Comique version, that is, with spoken dialogue between sung segments instead of the recitatives added later. This may prove a dangerous decision in non-french speaking countries, because if your singers are non-native speakers of the language, or at least have a better-than-average command of it, you may end up having them speaking some horrendously-sounding patois, and on the other hand having the audience left out in limbo, not understanding what's happening on stage. But here, o wonders of the new integrated Europe, you have a bunch of mostly british singers who surprisingly do achieve a more than passable utterance of one of those incomprehensible languages spoken beyond the channel, and on top of it, an audience who appear to actually understand! Naouri is of course a native french speaker, and french is one of the languages the versatile Von Otter speaks as fluently as her native swedish.

Jordan's conducting is very much to the point throughout, with an acute sense of tempo and dynamics inffusing the performance from beginning to end, you'll have a hard time finding a better-conducted Carmen on shop shelves. Visually he's very distractive, recalling Georges Prêtre in his dancing, he makes faces, frowns, stops dead suddenly beating time or weaves the baton frantically, FurtwÃngler-like, opens his eyes as in utter wonderment whilst holding the baton like some sort of weapon. His stick technique looks erratic sometimes and must have been confusing to the musicians, who usually tend to take a cavalier look at these podium antics; I presume these LPO members must have had a difficult time getting used to that. But the end result is impeccable.

Sound take is superior, as seems to be customary from this source, very realistic and theatre-like (some critics have complained on the singers being at times overshadowed by the orchestra, but isn't that what you do encounter when you listen to opera in the theatre and not just from recordings?), as is the video presentation. In sum, then, a must.