SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

SEEN AND HEARD UK OPERA REVIEW

Bizet, Carmen: Soloists, Chorus and Orchestra of Welsh National Opera, Frédéric Chaslin, conductor, Wales Millennium Centre, Cardiff, 27.2.2010 (GPu)

 

Conductor: Frédéric Chaslin

Director: Patrice Caurier and Moshe Leiser

Revival Director: Caroline Chaney

Set Designer: Christian Fenouillat

Costume Designer: Agostino Cavalca

Lighting Designer: Christophe Forey

Lighting realised by: Benjamin Naylor

Chorus Master: Stephen Harris

 

Carmen: Patricia Bardon

Don José: Gwyn Hughes Jones

Micaëlla: Sarah-Jane Davies

Escamillo: David Soar

Frasquita: Joanne Boag

Mercédès: Carolyn Dobbin

Zuniga: Henry Waddington

Le Dancaïre: Philip Lloyd-Evans

Remendado: Huw Llywelyn

Morales: James Robinson-May

Lillas Pastia / Guide: Jasey Hall

 

I have never quite felt able to join wholeheartedly in the widely expressed praise of the Caurier and Leiser production. The brochure for the current WNO season quotes the view of an unnamed writer in The Sunday Times: “This Carmen is the most bold, the most lucid and the most gripping of the thirty or so productions I have seen”. I wouldn’t want to go anything like that far, but it should certainly be acknowledged that this is a production with some real enough qualities. Its great virtue is that it takes the opera seriously. It assumes that the libretto means essentially what it says and what Bizet evidently took it to say and mean; it assumes that it is in a setting in nineteenth century Spain that the work’s subtleties are most readily likely to be accessed and made visible/audible.

 

On previous encounters with the production, however, I have found it somewhat excessively static at times, somewhat devoid of energy, and too unremittingly gloomy (in the most literal sense, scene after scene being underlit – that Carmen tells, metaphorically and morally, a gloomy story is a proposition with which I have no difficulty). I am glad to report that on this occasion there was rather less that was stodgy. In part this was, I suspect, due to the work of the director of this revival, Caroline Chaney. Some of the scenes seemed, if my memory is to be trusted, to have more movement, more expressive and theatrical gesture than they previously possessed. Something perhaps was also due to the excellent conducting of Frédéric Chaslin, full of vitality, without ever being over-fast or hurried, responsive to the élan and the contrasts, in terms of both tempos and dynamics of Berlioz’s writing, alert to the many delights of Bizet’s orchestration without ever being guilty of making such delights an end in themselves. The misjudgement about the lighting does, however, still seem to me to limit the power of the production. The opera’s libretto, by Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy is quite explicit - Act One is set in sunlight and heat, Act Two in a dark interior and Act Three in a dark exterior; Act Four takes us back to sunlight. There is a structure and a purpose to this – a purpose both moral and psychological. To present all four acts in what are only partially differentiated levels of gloom, as this production does – though it might make for some striking theatrical ‘effects’ – is to overlook an important element in the work’s larger meaning.

 

If, even so, I enjoyed this production more than on some previous occasions, a clear reason lay in the performance of the two principals. Patricia Bardon, after a slightly nervy or inhibited start in the habanera, was in very good voice, the bottom end of her register, in particular, being delightfully rich and fluid. She developed a wholly satisfying and plausible characterisation of Carmen, a knowing, rather cynical Carmen, a Carmen well aware of the inevitable self-destruction intrinsic to the choices she was making. As Don José, Gwyn Hughes Jones was not the supplest or subtlest of actors, though his relative stiffness in this regard actually seemed to work as part of his characterisation, serving to the creation of a Don José constantly awkward and ill-at-ease in a world he didn’t understand, and hopelessly out of his depth with a woman like Carmen, drawn almost as much by the prospect of a return to his mother (marriage to Micaëlla never seemed a possibility) as by the excitements, the mystery (to him) of life with Carmen. This was a Don José who stumbled into a new way of life and ‘love’, rather than consciously choosing it (at least until his return in Act IV, where his choice, in truth, is of death rather than love, of metaphorical imprisonment rather than freedom). Gwyn Hughes Jones had one or two moments of uncertainty as regards pitch, but for the most part this was a vocally moving, and animated performance, and there was an attractively controlled power in the best of his singing.. In Act Iv, particularly, he was as baffled as the bulls dispatched by Escamillo and his like, as (psychologically) mute in his failure of comprehension, his bewilderment as to the destructive forces, which he could never understand, which were at work on him.

 

David Soar offered a persuasively characterised and very decently sung Escamillo, menacing and self-possessed, arrogantly assuming his own right to command and to have his wishes met. As Micaëlla, Sarah-Jane Davies was dignity itself, a dignity co-existing with a nervous vulnerability, both articulated in a soprano voice of exceptional purity. She achieved a genuinely moving quality in a role which doesn’t always lend itself readily to such sympathetic interpretation. There was much promise here in the performance of a young singer who, many will remember, represented Wales in the Cardiff Singer of the World Competition in 2007. As Carmen’s companions Frasquita and Mercédês, Joanne Boag and Carolyn Dobbins were lively and engaging, their sopranos blending perfectly with Carmen’s mezzo in some fine trio passages. The roles of Le Dancare and Remendado were more caricatures than characters, but Philip Lloyd-Evans and Huw Llywelyn did what was asked of them with fair panache and presence. The same might be said of Henry Waddington as Zuniga – though here, though he was vocally perfectly satisfactory, there was an uneasy half-way house between caricature and characterisation in other respects.

 

I went to the theatre expecting to get rather less pleasure from the evening than in fact I received. Some very decent singing, some fine conducting and – it is almost needless to say it in the context of the Welsh National Opera some chorus work of a very high standard all contributed to that pleasure. So did that increased vitality that this revival of the production brought to it; so, too, in particular, did Patricia Bardon’s interestingly conceived characterisation of Carmen herself.

 

My only plea, next time the production is revived (as it very well may be) would be to borrow what, supposedly, were Goethe’s last words: “More light, more light”.

 

Glyn Pursglove