Cut-price Carmen comes at a cost
Italian director Damiano Michieletto is fashionable but erratic. His Guillaume Tell from 2015, with its controversial rape scene, almost provoked a riot at Covent Garden and we will never see it again. But his cleverly integrated Cav and Pag deservedly won an Olivier Award and will, I suspect, be revived often.
This new production of Bizet’s Carmen has an originality I find attractive and is assisted by the lively conducting of Antonello Manacorda. Sadly, we don’t see too much of the exceptionally musical tenor Piotr Beczala. He’s in demand elsewhere but hardly heard here, probably because of the eccentricity of the Royal Opera’s casting director, Peter Mario Katona. Or maybe Beczala is too expensive, an increasing problem at Covent Garden, where cash is in short supply. Something that will be apparent from some of the weak support here.
Beczala is now 57, and his beauty of tone is not what it was. But it was still a real treat to hear him again, and adds to my sadness that we have missed out on so many of his best years.
However, the undoubted star of the show was Aigul Akhmetshina, who has been quickly promoted from the Royal Opera’s Young Artists programme to the title role here, at which she excels.
Disappointingly, though, Olga Kulchynska as Micaela, saddled as she is with an unsympathetic interpretation of the role by the director, doesn’t make much of one of opera’s most attractive parts for a young soprano. Many years ago I heard the then almost unknown Kiri Te Kanawa bring the house down with her Micaela. No chance of that here.
Nor for that matter is Kostas Smoriginas’s Escamillo remotely charismatic. Covent Garden regulars are, Mystic Mellor sadly predicts, going to have to get used to this level of undercasting. The quality of some of the singing may be going down, but the prices, of course, are not.
A problem surely looms for the management.