Scottish Opera, 18/05/2023

Bizet : Carmen

The Chorus of Carmen

The Orchestra of Scottish Opera

Dane Lam

On tonight's episode of CSI: Seville....  

I'm being facetious, of course, but that was, after a fashion, how director John Fulljames presented his vision of Carmen to us, starting with Don José confessing to a detective, and the remainder of the opera being told in flashback as part of his interrogation.  It's not a completely new idea, I've seen a couple of productions that started at the end, but Fulljames used this setting to replace most of the original dialogue with scenes between José and the detective.  The spoken text, however, though actually briefer than the original French (all the performance was in English), had the effect of rendering the opera episodic.  There was quite a number of cuts in the music, so we seemed to go from set-piece to set-piece, and in an opera like Carmen, with such a plethora of well-known tunes, the overall impression was a 'best of' compilation.  At any rate, I felt there was an undercutting of dramatic tension, and the presence of the detective, silently working in the background as a SOCO during the final duet, was nothing more than a distraction.

Visually, there was no decor to speak of.  Three walls of a box lined the stage area, partitions that could move vertically up or down, fully or partially, and on which a live video feed projected the documents or objects set on a horizontal surface - table or floor.  In this fashion we saw evidence and photographs, and of course the cards of Act 3.  In interviews prior to the first night, Fulljames stated he was setting it during the Transición, the period immediately after Franco's death.  It's not terribly obvious from the costumes, but they're certainly in modern dress.  I will say that the cigarette girls in the first act more resembled Glasgow tea-ladies than Spanish factory workers, while the smugglers were gun-runners and "freedom fighters", brandishing raised clenched fists in the Communist salute. 

With the flashback technique involved, the production was clearly centred on José.  Fulljames represents the soldiers as a corrupt force (which they may well have been at that time), but thereby implies that José has been corrupted by becoming a part of that corrupt force.  Despite claiming that he returned to the Mérimée source for inspiration, Fulljames makes the classic mistake of forgetting that José joined the army because he's hiding from a murder charge in his home province, which is at the other end of the country from Seville.  José is emphatically not some decent country boy driven to desertion, robbery and murder by the evil influence of a wild gypsy woman, he's a violent, possessive man in denial of his true nature.  It's precisely that 'bad boy' streak in him that gets Carmen's attention, but she has underestimated its strength, because he goes to some lengths to conceal it, and that's what gets her killed.  Although Fulljames shows the violence in José early on, it seems a recent development within the character, he acts shocked at himself, at his own actions.  On the other hand, with the one character not present in Mérimée, the too-saintly Micaëla, Fulljames makes her an asthmatic, drawing on her inhaler at moments of stress, and this 'weakness' makes her a more realistic contrast to the vibrant figure of Carmen.

Justina Gringytė (Carmen) and Alok Kumar (José)
Carmen, Act 4, Scottish Opera
(© James Glossop, May 2023)

Musically, the strength of this performance was very predominantly in the orchestra.  Dane Lam's conducting was crisp and clear, with plenty of fine woodwind playing in particular, which is essential for Bizet.  However, as mentioned, the performance was sung in English, and although Christopher Cowell's translation was not a bad one, I felt that at times it tripped pretty well everyone up at one point or another either on delivery - the timing of the line - or on intonation.  Especially in the first half, there was a lot of slightly approximative intonation from the Carmen and the Escamillo in particular.  The chorus sang well enough most of the time, but only really came to life twice, in the 'quarrel' chorus of Act 1, when the women of the factory are squabbling fiercely, and at the start of the last act, with the parade of cuadrillas before the bullfight, a parade which we do not see directly, but indirectly through the excitement of the crowd.  There, Chorus Director Susannah Wapshott really let us hear what her forces were capable of, but elsewhere they lacked that same fire, though without ever disgracing themselves in any way. 

Justina Gringytė was returning to Scottish Opera as Carmen, having sung it in 2015 in the previous production.  It's still fine, dark-hued, quite fruity mezzo voice, and she has a bold stage presence, but the English was definitely a problem for her, and her heavy accent got in the road more than once.   Nor did she particularly strike sparks off her Don José, despite an excellent performance from Alok Kumar, who has a strong, assured tenor voice with good definition, though a little more variation in dynamics would have been welcome.  His diction was particularly good, though in the spoken dialogue his American accent (as well as the strong Scottish accent of Carmen Pieraccini as the detective) came as a bit of a shock.  Philip Rhodes brought plenty of physical swagger to Escamillo, but could not match that vocally, and there was an unevenness in his voice production that diminished his impact.  Hye-Youn Lee, on the other hand, seemed initially a rather dowdy Micaëla, and vocally a little mature-sounding, but then in Act 3 delivered her aria with beautifully judged feeling and tone and duly stole the show.

I don't think this production has much in the way of legs on it; it's visually unappealing, and the concept becomes tedious.  I also don't approve of the English translation, because I think it causes the singers technical problems, but that's a slightly different issue.  At least, though, there was some good singing, and very good orchestral playing - but that's a poor tribute to one of the most exciting operas in the entire repertoire.

[Next : 27th May]