Carmen, Bizet Genia Kühmeier (Micaëla), Christina Landshamer
(Frasquita), Magdalena Kožená (Carmen), Rachel Frenkel
(Mercédès), Jonas Kaufmann (Don José́), Simone del Savio
(Dancaïre), Jean-Paul Fouchécourt (Remendado), André Schuen
(Moralès), Kostas Smoriginas (Escamillo), Christian van Horn
(Zuniga), Chorus of the Berlin Staatsoper, Berlin Philharmonic
Orchestra, c. Simon Rattle. EMI 440 2852 (two CDs)
After
the same cast and conductor’s appearances with his orchestra at
the Salzburg Easter Festival in a fully staged production,
followed by concert performances at the Berlin Philharmonie, the
entire company decamped to the studio to make this by then
well-beddedin account of Bizet’s opera. Its chief assets are the
orchestral contribution and Rattle himself. Now ten years into
their relationship, their rapport is complete. The playing is
delivered with exemplary precision and textural clarity, while
the choral singing, too, is clean and airy. Throughout, Rattle
captures the score’s lightness and grace, even at times when
passion takes over. From these points of view, this is an
appreciable Carmen.
Unfortunately, the Oeser edition—
long ago discredited, and excoriated in these pages (and others)
by Bizet experts ever since it appeared—turns up yet again.
Given that there are better alternatives, this is in itself
baffling. Though the point is made that we have here a version
of the opera with authentic dialogue (Bizet did not live long
enough to write his own recitatives), most of the spoken text is
actually cut.
Of the cast, Jonas Kaufmann stands
out for his vocal presence and imaginative artistry as Don José.
Though his tone lower down grows ever more baritonal (the duet
with Kostas Smoriginas’s Escamillo sometimes sounds like two
baritones fighting a vocal duel), there’s no sense of break as
it climbs into the higher regions, where its tenorial shine is
unimpaired. Scrupulous in observing dynamic markings, Kaufmann
also supplies dramatic urgency in every phrase; you sense that
he lives the role. He’s far and away the best of the principals.
Magdalena Kožená’s Carmen is frankly a
disappointment. She’s at her best in the final scene, where
Kaufmann’s dramatic fire seems to spark something in her.
Her solo in the Card Scene is also engaged. Elsewhere, she
registers as small-scale and colourless, most of all in such
set-pieces as the habanera and seguidilla, which fall pretty
flat, not helped by the fact that she makes so little of the
text. This is a good-girl Carmen, encroaching not just on
Micaëla’s man but also on her artistic territory.
In the
soprano role Genia Kühmeier doesn’t offer enough contrast or
dramatic warmth in a reading that is similarly small-scale and
charmless. Her best moment, fortunately, is her Act 3 aria;
though even there one feels little depth of foundation to the
tone. Smoriginas is again limited in impact, hampered by poor
French and a characterless reading of the part, even in the
Toreador’s Song. Taken altogether, the result is lacking far too
much to enter the list of classic accounts.
