With more than a dozen Carmens available on DVD — following a
variety of editions, from Oeser to Oscar Hammerstein II, with
Carmens of varying shape, shade and style — was there a demand
for this “new” one, captured seven years ago in Zurich? Maybe
not, but I’m happy to have it.
At first, I wasn’t so
sure. What’s that in front of the closed curtains? A sleeping
dog — and you know what they say about them. Then the curtains
part for a stark view of a bare cyclorama and a Bayreuthian
disc, onto which Moralès and squad shamble with a big “Policía”
umbrella and a patio chair (is this a beach? in Seville?) and
ogle the unseen passersby in jocularly choreographed operetta
style. Enter Micaela — for a modest striptease. I think I know
what the respected director Matthias Hartmann is up to: he wants
to keep things light for now, before the shade sets in. And
light it stays, with the entrance of a bumbling, bespectacled,
greasy-haired José (a barely recognizable Jonas Kaufmann) and
the descent of a neon cigarette exuding neon smoke: Carmen can’t
be far away.
Once she appears, Hartmann’s staging
focuses. Vesselina Kasarova ambles on in her Loren-esque house
dress and makes clear just whose show it is — and why I’m happy
this performance has been preserved. This was a role debut for
the mezzo, but there’s nothing tentative or half-formed about
her Carmen, who’s funny and witty, sultry (but never vulgar) and
always thinking. There’s not a moment when those big, expressive
eyes go dead. This menthol-cool Carmen is smarter than everyone
around her and knows it. Vocally, Kasarova won’t please all
listeners; the purrs and growls and glottal attacks that have
long marked — some would say marred — her singing are present,
to excite or annoy. But there’s also a wealth of subtlety, of
elegant phrasing, of technical finesse, of vivid word-painting
delivered easily and naturally. When calculation shows, it’s
Carmen’s, not Kasarova’s.
She has excellent support.
Kaufmann sang his first Josés in London two years earlier,
opposite Anna Caterina Antonacci in Francesca Zambello’s new
production, and it, too, is available on DVD from Decca. If you
don’t already own it and want his José (as you should), your
choice will likely rest on the Carmen and on the staging —
updated and unfrilled, or traditional and fairly fancy (with
real chickens, donkey and horse in lieu of that fake sleeping
dog)? Kaufmann is in fine, supple form on both, but this later
performance seems fuller and more detailed. Michele Pertusi’s
Escamillo, a burly, good-natured, tacky jock, manages his
hard-to-handle couplets more deftly than most Carmen toreros.
Isabel Rey, looking uncannily like Olympia Dukakis’s Anna
Madrigal, is a good-enough Micaela; but there’s a striking pair
of lowlifes in Gabriel Bermúdez, a slick hunk of a Dancaïre, and
Javier Camarena, a jolly-faced Remendado who casually slices
Zuniga’s throat and pinches his police sunglasses. Franz
Welser-Möst leads a brisk, lean, no-nonsense account of Michael
Rot’s critical edition of the Guiraud version of Bizet’s score,
with its occasionally notable, often delectable departures from
the norm. And “the norm” is something to which this Carmen
flatly refuses to adhere.
