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Carmen

Published Monday 20 October 2008 at 10:35 by Edward Bhesania

The second of Glyndebourne’s three touring autumn productions, David McVicar’s Carmen (revived by Lee Blakeley) runs high on the smoulder factor. Act I’s cramped, run-down urban setting, with its rusting fences and crumbling buildings, is no sunny picture-postcard of Seville, but it does present a suitably gritty backdrop for the basic instincts shared by the cigarette girls and the soldiers posted nearby.

In Act II, Lillas Pastia’s claustrophobic, smoky basement bar is the setting for a gyrating gypsies’ dance that whips up into a frenzy, as well as Carmen’s seductive solo turn for Don Jose’s eyes only.

Making her title-role debut, American mezzo Katherine Rohrer sometimes has to work hard to wrap her svelte, model-like physique around Carmen’s rough manners and flighty sensibility, and she has a vocal lightness that makes the job yet more tricky, but she sings with focus and passion. Passion seemed to elude Yongoon Lee’s Don Jose in his Act I duet with Carmen and though he warms up quickly, it’s surely that incendiary first meeting with the gypsy seductress that sets our antihero on his journey of self-destruction.

Natasha Jouhl sings a splendid Micaela - the embodiment of the wholesome life Don Jose should be choosing. Other striking performances come in Dawid Kimberg’s bullish corporal, Morales, Lukas Jakobski’s deep-toned lieutenant Zuniga and Richard Mosley-Evans’ sharp-witted smuggler Le Dancaire. Only Jean-Luc Ballestra’s Escamillo is mildly disappointing, for its wilted machismo, compounded by a dandyish double-breasted suit and white scarf.

In the pit, young Czech conductor Jakub Hrusa commands fiery playing, drawing out Bizet’s vivid colouring with full extraction.

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