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This new production, by Calixto Bieito, is much travelled and much modified, to the point where, to my surprise, it has no shock tactics and not much character of any kind. For Act I the only props are a flagpole and a telephone kiosk, there is minimal sense of location and only when the first of five cars appears do we get an indication that we may be in the Spain of Franco’s declining years. The populace has been brainwashed to the point where they idiotically wave at and cheer any passing celebrity, or turn on one another and fight without any reason. There is no suggestion of literal heat, intrinsic to the whole work: when Nietzsche expressed his admiration for Carmen by saying that Bizet’s music didn’t sweat, he meant that it exudes, as does the action, a dry heat. In Bieito’s production there isn’t much heat of any kind, though periodically there is light, Bieito being fond of blinding audiences. The music, too, under the highly individual baton of the rising star Ryan Wigglesworth, glistens rather than glows, and he seems more interested in eliciting strange and often beautiful sonorities than in creating drama.
The fact is that despite its fame Carmen is, dramatically, a broken-backed affair. Even more so when, as here, the spoken dialogue is reduced to a few lines, and those in unintelligible varieties of English — they needed surtitles more than the sung parts. All explanation of who Don José is is eliminated, and since Adam Diegel has minimal acting skills, quite apart from the deficiencies of his singing, one wondered why Carmen took any interest in him. Not that Ruxandra Donose in the title role has any personality to spare, either. She undersang the habanera without imparting any sinister or sexy character to it, and really only came on form for the great Card Song, where she was tremendous. Her voice lacks allure, though, and for all the low-cut blouses and slit skirts she fails to suggest a free spirit and a vamp.
Neither she nor any of the other singers gets any help from this particular and peculiar version of the score, where people come and go with without explanation, so that there is little sense of a progressing or accumulating drama. Only for the final scene, which is musically perhaps the weakest part of the score, but dramatically the most intense, did Wigglesworth, Donose, Diegel and Bieito come together to shattering effect. If only they could impart that kind of fervour to the rest of the performance, we could at last celebrate a great Carmen. There is a strange conception of Escamillo, who turns up at the start as an alcoholic conjuror, again with no sex appeal. He manages an individual and interesting Toreador Song, and in the last act, for that wonderful tiny duet with Carmen, is even dressed for the fight. Relations between him and José are more opaque than usual. Micaëla gets a makeover too, smartly if provincially dressed, and in Act III laughing contemptuously at Carmen before walking out of the action. The minor characters hardly register at all, except when indulging in embarrassing dance routines.
The Royal Academy of Music has come up trumps yet again with Haydn’s La vera costanza, the most delightful opera of his I have seen, though that is probably largely accounted for by the superlative musical standards of the RAM and the clarifying, witty production. Trevor Pinnock kept the score airborne from the brilliant overture onwards, and in the first cast, which I saw, there wasn’t any singer who was less than excellent, and there are seven of them. The star, however, and rightly, was the Rosina of Helen Bailey; the heroine of the opera, though the sister of a fisherman and much despised by titled snobs. Haydn, everyone agrees, was not strong on characterisation, the main reason that his operas never become repertoire works. Bailey made Rosina into a moving, passionate character with her powerful acting and her lovely, expressively employed voice. I have no room to mention any of the other performers, but I felt, as I often do at the RAM, that if this were filmed it would make a desirable DVD, far more worthwhile than most of the redundant and audacious ones of the standard works that come out at such a rate.
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