Festival Opera
Carmen
Festival Theatre, Edinburgh
Four stars
IN a succession of recent productions, Gaelle Arquez has staked her claim to be the definitive Carmen of our time, and her performance is the chief reason to catch Andreas Homoki’s staging of the first opera in the 2024 Edinburgh International Festival programme.
This production is already well-tried, and – Saimir Pirgu’s Don Jose aside – the supporting cast is intact. Save the title role, its characterisation eschews subtlety: the tenor leaps straight from hapless to deranged obsessive during Act 1, while Elbenita Kajtazi’s Micaela makes a feisty start, kneeing her Seville-visit seducer in the crotch, but is later seemingly startled by the spotlight for her Act 3 aria.
Such inconsistency is a wilful ingredient of a production that jumps across the centuries in costuming and staging as it makes play of the origins of one of the most popular operas in the canon.
The Opera-Comique in Paris is both where Carmen premiered and where this version originated and elements of the venue are re-created on the Festival Theatre stage in a show that asks its audience why we still want to see it, a century and a half later.
The answer, of course, is for the music. With the Scottish Chamber Orchestra under the baton of Louis Langrée in the pit, in that department it is on the firmest ground. Rarely do musicians sound to be enjoying their work as much as the SCO players do from the wonderful overture onwards.
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As well as holding the stage as a performer, Arquez has the vocal instrument to make the most of the part, and both Pirgu and Jean-Fernand Setti as Escamillo are well suited to their roles. But it is in the smaller characters and the consistency of the chorus that the musical excellence of the production is grounded.
Scenically, this a Carmen stripped back to its essentials, even if Don Jose is the character subjected to the most dressing and undressing. The use of false proscenium curtains, stark lighting cues, and switches of perspective that include the audience in its knowing theatricality when the house lights go up, will not be to all tastes.
But the first-night audience, applauding the big tunes while sitting on its hands at other points in the night, seemed to be in on the joke.
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