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The Times, January 5, 2010 |
Richard Morrison |
Bizét, Carmen, Milano, 7. Dezember 2009 |
Carmen at La Scala, Milan
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Milan’s opera season always starts oddly late in
the year — in mid-December — and the opening production is inevitably a
showy affair. This season’s curtain-raiser, Carmen, was more extraordinary
than most. With the best seats priced at more than £2,000, and the stalls
packed with Italy’s foremost glitterati dressed to dazzle, expectations were
high — to put it mildly. But as if determined to pile even more pressure on
itself, La Scala employed an avant-garde theatre director, Emma Dante, who
had never previously directed an opera, and — in the title-role — a
25-year-old singer, Anita Rachvelishvili, who had never sung anything before
on the professional stage.
A Georgian mezzo with a gloriously full sound that will clearly whisk her
round the world’s great opera houses in quick succession, Rachvelishvili was
only 23 and still studying with Mirella Freni at La Scala’s Academy when she
auditioned for the minor role of Frasquita. But Daniel Barenboim was so
struck by her voice that he gave her the main role, and two years of
personal coaching to prepare her.
The result was vocally impressive but, as yet, dramatically limited.
Rachvelishvili sings a passionate Gypsy girl but doesn’t yet embody one. Her
stately Habanera was about as sexy as the Brahms Requiem. It was left to
her Don José to supply the fire in the relationship, and Jonas Kaufmann
certainly cranked up his dark, hefty tenor thrillingly in his big numbers.
Yet it was precisely in portraying this central relationship that Dante’s
staging seemed least convincing. She transferred the action to her native
Sicily and inserted dozens of bitter little digs at a hypocritical Roman
Catholic Church that constantly turns a blind eye to assault and abuse
within its own ranks. Processions of priests and acolytes seemed constantly
to be observing, and endorsing, every violent twist in the tale.
Fair game, you may feel. But Dante’s central thesis was that Carmen is a
story about men inflicting violence on women. She opened with soldiers
beating up a pregnant girl, and ended with Don José raping Carmen before
killing her. This black-and-white view of their relationship, as sadist and
innocent victim, did scant justice to the complexity of either character.
And the feminist agenda was farcically undermined by choreography that
offered as gratuitous a display of female flesh as I’ve seen in an opera
house for years.
No complaints about the conducting, though. Barenboim drew exquisitely
silky, delicate playing from the Scala orchestra and rich, responsive
singing from the chorus — as well as fervent performances from, in
particular, Erwin Schrott (Escamillo) and Adriana Kucerova (Mercedes).
Provocative and never dull, this production returns to La Scala later this
year and is then expected to transfer to Barenboim’s “other” theatre — the
Staatsoper in Berlin. |
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