Opera
Liberte bodies
Rodney Milnes
It must be a plot on the part of our Tourist Board. The Edinburgh Festival Carmen is the second opera set in Seville in which the curtain has risen on new productions this year to reveal umbrellas, and like the Glyndebourne Don Giovanni, it is played in a claustrophobic box. It's sunnier, safer, and possibly sexier, they seem to be saying, in Skegness.
There are two sorts of festival, operas: those that cannot survive in the repertory and need the festival approach, and those that survive so successfully that they need that same approach to rescue them from lazy predictability. That, I trust, was why Carmen was chosen for Edinburgh, rather than because it came packaged with an important new recording, was starry enough to attract BP, or because these were the only circumstances under which Teresa Berganza could be tempted into playing the title-role for the first time. Either, any or both ways, it has worked. This was the most exciting Carmen I have heard, and the most interesting I have seen.
Those who regard it as the first verismo opera (unless you count Traviata), or at least the first since Poppea, will be uneasy on hearing that this is a determinedly nonnaturalistic production. Maybe Piero Faggioni (the producer of the Royal Opera's super-realistic Girl of the Golden West) thought this was the way to do it, or realised that a naturalistic (i.e. four sets) staging was not on in the King's Theatre — nor will it be, I fear, in the Holiday Inn. Thank you and goodnight Edinburghers. Either way etc. Ezio Frigerio, designer of La Scala's Simon Boccanegra seen at Covent Garden last year, has devised a permanent set, a beautifully textured grey box with an undulating pumice-stone floor, in which the costumes are also largely grey with only the gentlest pastel shades for the principals. The action, arranged in formal groups, is seen behind a gauze and lit with cool, virtuoso subtlety by Faggioni and Victor Lockwood. Like one of those colour photographs of a monochrome subject, it looks absolutely gorgeous. Maybe it did cost as much as they say to achieve this simplicity — I don't care.
The concept—the only drawback, alas—is that the box represents Jose's prison. Each act opens and usually closes with him in a pool of amber light going through What's-My-Line mime to suggest (not always convincingly) he is remembering the events that brought him there; there are isolated moments in the action when the same lighting effect is brought into play. This parallels the distancing narrative device in Merimee's nouvelle, and is a useful way of getting round the fact that the dia logue is cut to an absolute minimum (and beyond in places—but at least the ghastly recitatives are rejected). Deprived of narrative cohesion, the events have, as it were„ to be selected by the narrator. Although I admire these jugglings with virtue and necessity, the pools-of-consciousness don't really have much to do with the music of the entr'actes; by the beginning of the fourth act I was mildly irritated by them, and by the end more than irritated; there was no intervention by the bull-fight crowd, and here too was the only surviving betise from the Oeser edition, which had otherwise been sensitively re-edited by Claudio Abbado—enough of the extra music that we must have in Act One, and apart from this one instance none of Oeser's crass misreadings.
Whereas there was a sense of ironic detachment on stage, true to_ Merimee, there was none in the pit, where apart from a cool, second-night-ish first act, Abbado went hell-for-leather for Bizet. The 'almost animalistic passion of his reading was balanced by a true musician's appreciation the • composer's instrumentation. The London Symphony Orchestras's playing was clean and vividly coloured; I had forgotten the physical impact of this score in the size of theatre for which it was written. For Abbado alone it is worth hieing off to Edinburgh next week and sleeping with heaven-knows-whom in order to get a ticket. (The current black market price is said to be f50).
It is also worth it for Berganza. Just as we might be offended if foreigners assumed all English women were a sort of amalgam of Marie Lloyd, Nell Gwyn and, oh, never miqd, so the Spanish are decidedly wary of Carmen as the representative flower of Iberian womanhood. There is a long, toodefensive piece by Berganza in the programme, and the other notably respectable Carmen (on record, at least) is Victoria de los Angeles. I do not need to report that Berganza sings the role like a dream; some may detect a lack of beef in the lower register, but musicianship and sheer bloody class of this order are more than compensation. At first I thought she would be too lady-like; !someone brought her a chair for the Habanera, and she used it. But she and Faggioni play Carmen as the Liberated Woman, which is not nearly as depressing as it sounds and, if surprising on the Continent, not to those who know the excellent Coliseum production. As a reading of Bizet it is fine, but less so of Merimee, whose Carmen is a murdering prostitute. The liberte bit is underlined (and not overstated) in many little points in the production, Berganza also has a nice line in self-mockery, which the audience appreciated. There was nothing of the prima donna about her. Maybe she was too coritemptuous of Jost at the end — she didn't even look at him when she returned his ring. But that was what the production was about, and indeed she would have got away scot-free had she not then laughed at him in For the rest, Placido Domingo was a good Jose, no more — the role is a brute. Tom Krause was a wonderfully fatuous Escamillo, Leona Mitchell vocally ideal as Micaela, Mariemma an authentic and exciting Flamenco dancer. I enjoyed Gordon Sandison's and Geoffrey Pogson's hilarious double-act as the smugglers. There was only one French-speaker in the cast —Jean Lame as Zuniga — and it showed. But in a performance so full of thought, visual imagination, red corpuscles and theatrical know-how, I was not prepared to get too snarky about a few French vowel sounds.
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