Opéra-Comique's Carmen brings high musical qualities to Edinburgh

This Carmen comes from Paris’ Opéra-Comique, which premiered the work in 1875. Director Andreas Homoki and set designer Paul Zoller use the Parisian theatre itself as their setting for this production, the opera that has encircled the globe now trapped in the place of its origin. So we see the working space of a theatre in Paris transplanted to Edinburgh’s Festival theatre. A dreary back wall, looking much like other opera productions that had similar ideas, is omnipresent. 

Each act has a different time period. We first see Don José in contemporary street clothes, somehow onstage with a traditionally costumed Carmen, Escamillo and Micaëla, and a chorus of opera-goers in smart bourgeois Third Republic attire. The men abuse poor Micaëla, this naïve country girl in unassuming grey, who has somewhere become streetwise enough to knee one of them in his lower abdomen. Act 3 sees an updating to the mid-20th century, the smugglers' contraband piled up mid-stage. There are, in terms of dress, no lowlifes in this Carmen. Carmen herself dies having selected a very smart outfit for an evening out, surprising from a 19th century gypsy factory worker. 

None of this matters much in delivering Prosper Merimée’s once shocking, even scandalous, tale, for much else impresses. There are some striking stage pictures, often painterly, beginning with our first sightings of the smoke-wreathed cigarette girls. Franck Evin’s lighting design spotlights these moments, and big numbers like Carmen’s Habanera, as if for a West End musical. Micaëla, alone of the cast, raises her hands against the glare of these spotlights, a real country girl who has wandered onto a stage for the first time in her life. 

The cast is a strong one, if not quite uniformly so. Above all, French mezzo-soprano Gaëlle Arquez is close to being the complete Carmen. Her alluring sound has a rich warm middle and lower range, and there seems to be no audible bridge to higher notes, everything is seamlessly sung with one voice. Whether a natural gift or years of hard work, or both, hardly matters, for the result was a remarkable vocal assurance. She took care not just of the notes but the rhythms too, in her seductively persuasive Habanera and Seguidilla, and she relished the text. The depth of her fatalist portrayal was especially evident in Act 3’s monologue, when she draws the card of death. I doubt I was alone in wondering if there was some way to avoid the destruction of such a glorious creature – though without Barrie Kosky’s solution where, after being stabbed, Carmen stands up and walks off with a shrug.

Albanian tenor Saimir Pirgu’s Don José suffered somewhat from ill-direction, twice having his clothes removed, first by a gang of children and later by Carmen. At least he was given a clean vest. He was clean vocally too, with an attractive basic sound, and a powerful ring to his high notes. This served him well in those moments where José is in extremis, especially at the close of the opera. Pirgu's Flower Aria was less successful, for his Italianate manner and gleaming high notes rattling the rafters were hardly what was needed in this heart-breaking appeal. 

Elbenita Kajtazi’s Micaëla suffered too from some confusion over the exact characterisation intended, and from being left onstage when the music opening Act 4 arrives. But she sang sweetly enough to sound like an ingénue, though not always comfortable above the stave. As Escamillo Jean-Fernand Setti brought adequate, if limited, vocal resource, but has an imposingly large frame, and could stare down any bull – definitely a swaggerer. Among a very good hand of comprimarios, vocal honours were taken by the very lovely singing of Carmen’s two buddies, soprano Norma Nahoun’s Frasquita and mezzo Aliénor Feix’s Mercédès.

This ensemble all performed in Paris but their local pit band was replaced here by the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, sounding as if they are enjoying themselves. The flutes, to whom Bizet gives some of the finest music, deserved the acknowledgment given at the curtain call. The singing of both the children of the Maîtrise Populaire de l'Opéra-Comique, and the adult choir Accentus, was splendid throughout. Conductor Louis Langrée is clearly a master of this imperishable score, and directed with no little élan. A flawed production of Carmen, then, but musically a most memorable one.