Passion of Don José

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  Michael Tanner

  Passion of Don José

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In fact, this should have been renamed The Passion of Don José, for Carmen played an incidental role in his downfall, which was preordained. The opera opened with a firing squad killing him, and that was how it ended, too. So the work itself was his memory or fantasy. That approach, which isn’t new — something similar was staged in Edinburgh in 1976 — runs into problems since José is absent for so much of the time, or should be; while Carmen is normally aggressively present. That’s not how Martin Kusej managed things, and since Barenboim seems to collaborate closely with his directors, which would be fine if they were a better lot, musical emphases were odd. Almost none of Carmen’s music got the kind of emphasis it needs, and the heroine herself, played by Marina Domashenko, threw away the Haba