Young women strut around in hot pants and read their fate in the cards. Listless men in police uniform sweat, drool and rule. Spain, in the Royal Opera House’s Carmen, newly staged by Damiano Michieletto and conducted by Antonello Manacorda, is a semi-urban wasteland at the end of the General Franco era. A country long steeped in God, corrida and family has stumbled across modernity. Girls bare their midriffs and want freedom: a cry more urgent and credible in this mid-1970s updating than when Georges Bizet’s masterpiece was new a century earlier, in 1875 (and flopped).
With the world-class Russian mezzo-soprano Aigul Akhmetshina in the title role, the ROH has snapped up a dream Carmen. (A second cast will be led by another Russian, Vasilisa Berzhanskaya, from 12 May.) Still only 27, a former ROH Jette Parker artist, Akhmetshina inhabits the part in all its nuances. She shows vulnerability, is vocally athletic and physically compelling. Her virile but hapless Don José is Piotr Beczala; they have just sung the same roles together in Carrie Cracknell’s new Carmen at the New York Met. The Polish tenor’s gilded top notes match Akhmetshina’s own in energy and brilliance: he is deft at suggesting, in gesture and bearing, a man tight-knotted by duty and desire.
Now the Carmen of choice all over the world, Akhmetshina is too astute, too much of a fireball, to fall back on habit. No doubt she will create an entirely different character when she performs the role at Glyndebourne this summer (conducted by Robin Ticciati, directed by Diane Paulus), just as she did when she jumped in, aged 22, to Barrie Kosky’s ROH staging in late 2018. Kosky’s radical adventure was a tour de force, set on a precipitous flight of stairs. Not everyone loved it. I did. Its ROH life, much like that of its title character, was short, maddening and provocative. It could never have lasted.
Designed by Paolo Fantin, with costumes by Carla Teti and lighting by Alessandro Carletti, Michieletto’s production looks durable. In a near-empty stage, a cabin pinpoints the action, functioning as police station, nightclub, pre-bullfight dressing room. A grid of 100 small lights blazes down, compounding the mood of perpetual monotony and enclosure. The use of a revolve echoes the same creative team’s successful ROH double bill Cavalleria rusticana and Pagliacci.
There are clever touches. Putting on stage the woman who is powerful by virtue of her absence – Don José’s mother – in black mantilla, clutching a card of death, was not one. Nor was it smart to portray poor, plucky Micaëla as a cardigan-and-specs-wearing saddo. Or perhaps this visual cliche has now gone full circle and become a novelty. The exceptional and lyrical Ukrainian soprano Olga Kulchynska, in her ROH debut, triumphed regardless.
Musical standards give this Carmen its edge and excitement, and make it worth catching at its forthcoming cinema relays. Manacorda probed the score’s fire and detail, with the ROH orchestra, especially solo strings and woodwind, alert, subtle, expansive. Inevitably, the spoken dialogue – always a problem, and here in none-too-convincing French – gave a stop-start feeling to the performance. That was not Manacorda’s fault. His sense of tempo and momentum were impressive. Kostas Smoriginas as Escamillo, unappetising in a lime green raw silk suit, Sarah Dufresne as Frasquita and Gabrielė Kupšytė as Mercédès led the large and admirable supporting ensemble. The ROH chorus was joined by the ROH Youth Opera Company, a chorus of nine- to 13-year-olds who sang enthusiastically and captured our hearts.
Some of these young musicians may one day aspire to join the National Youth Choir, or its smaller offshoot, the National Youth Chamber Choir: nearly two dozen talented 18- to 25-year-olds, many embarking on professional careers. As part of the London Handel festival, with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, the NYCC performed Handel’s Four Coronation Anthems, interspersed with related works by living composers: Héloïse Werner, Anna Clyne, Ben Nobuto and Roderick Williams. With singing and playing of deft assurance, the evening bowled along under the baton of Sofi Jeannin, starting with Handel’s Zadok the Priest.
The contrasts between the new works proved stimulating. (All but Clyne’s In Thy Beauty, from 2021, were world premieres.) Werner’s Rejoice! created five minutes of musical exuberance and verbal refraction, sounds and syllables uniting into recognisable words: all, people, rejoice. Nobuto’s Face Anthem! had a dance-like sampled energy, punchy and effective. Williams’s Exceeding Glad!, the seeds of which grew out of this singer-composer’s own involvement with the coronation of King Charles last year, beguiled with its joyfulness, including hand claps, finger clicks and a vivid impression of pealing bells.
Starting with a tribute to the Hungarian composer Péter Eötvös, who died last month, the London Symphony Orchestra opened its latest LSO Futures/Panufnik Composers Scheme concert with Eötvös’s own Per Luciano Berio: brief, beautiful, atmospheric, new to the UK. Without space here to say more, I can only urge you to check out the latest featured composers, each conducted with clarity and empathy by François-Xavier Roth. They are: Christian Drew, Donghoon Shin and Stef Conner.
From watery, reverb-heavy doo-wop (I’m quoting), to a virtuosic solo cellist (the LSO’s Rebecca Gilliver) journeying through an exquisite aural nightscape, to a death metal-inspired wild bullet of sound, brutal but harmonically radiant, this was a feast for enquiring ears. The concert ended with a dazzle in the form of Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra. How the second violins launched into the fugal finale at such a lightning pace without, I swear, moving their bows will remain an enigma.
Star ratings (out of five)
Carmen ★★★
National Youth Chamber Choir/OAE/Jeannin ★★★★
London Symphony Orchestra/Roth ★★★★★
• Carmen is at the Royal Opera House, London, until 31 May, with a live cinema relay on 1 May at 6.45pm and encore screenings from 5 May, 2pm
