It is easy to understand the temptation: staging a new Carmen at Paris’s Opéra Comique, the very theatre that commissioned and premiered it in 1875, why not have the building itself, and its memories of Carmens past, play their own role in the action? The stumbling block comes when such a site-specific production ups sticks to an entirely new location. Ghosts, as everyone knows, don’t tend to travel well, and so the full resonance of Andreas Homoki’s time-shifting backstage Carmen fades once transplanted to Edinburgh’s Festival theatre.
If anything, an even heftier dose of meta-theatricality may have helped. The initial striking juxtaposition of a Don José in street clothes, a traditionally costumed Carmen, and a chorus of opera-goers straight from a Manet painting, sets up questions about objectification and the audience/performer divide which are never fully explored; and, while deliberately self-aware staginess (for which Franck Evin’s lighting design practically deserves its own character credit) is intriguing in the cabaret-style showstoppers, it is less effective when it comes to advancing the plot.
Fortunately, Gaëlle Arquez’s magnetic, sinuously sung Carmen could tell the story on an empty stage if she had to: it is testament to the depth of her portrayal that, while her Habanera ticks every crowd-pleasing box, she is even more compelling in the dark-edged fatalism of her En Vain Pour Éviter. Saimir Pirgu’s earnest, energised Don José can’t quite match her for complexity, but on vocal charisma they are neck and neck: his gleaming, generous tenor seeming to gain richness with every act.
As their respective rivals, Elbenita Kajtazi is a focused, clear-voiced Micaëla – though it’s a shame the production doesn’t do more to tease out her half of the virgin/whore trope – while Jean-Fernand Setti’s imposing Escamillo, if a bit of a blunt instrument, certainly brings all the requisite swagger. Soprano Norma Nahoun and mezzo Aliénor Feix make a spirited pair as Frasquita and Mercédès, François Lis a subtly menacing Zuniga, and the two smugglers – Matthieu Walendzik as Le Dancaïre and Abel Zamora as Le Remendado – do their best to bring out the comique side of the opera’s origins.
Flying the flag for Scotland amid an ensemble otherwise imported wholesale from Paris, the Scottish Chamber Orchestra is on sparkling form under conductor Louis Langrée, whose precision and lightness of touch lends a new transparency to this most familiar of scores. There’s vivid, thoroughly idiomatic singing, too, from both the Opéra Comique’s children’s chorus and the adults of the chamber choir Accentus, variously doing duty as grisettes, claqueurs and even a crowd of punters watching the bullfight on a pub TV – another of Homoki’s ideas which, however clever in isolation, never quite coalesce into a cohesive whole.
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