Met Opera 2023-24 Cinema Review: Carmen
Piotr Beczała and Aigul Akhmetshina in Carmen (Ken Howard/Met Opera)
You will be shocked, readers, to learn that the cinema HD encore of Bizet’s masterpiece from the Met was my very first Carmen. And you call yourself an opera blogger! you howl. Hold your castanets! Carmen is one of the most sensual operas in the repertoire, and it frankly would have been wrong for me to see it before my adolescence. For years, therefore, I contented myself with recordings — Magdalena Kožená and Elīna Garanča, mostly. The best Verdian mezzos are Eastern European, don’t ask me why. This year, on information that this staging was thoroughly boring, including physically, I took a leap and went to the cinema. The intelligence was correct where it most mattered to me, and I can confidently say that this was one of the best-sung Carmens in recent memory, and I could not have asked for a better introduction.
Aigul Akhmetshina in Carmen (Ken Howard/Met Opera)
Aigul Akhmetshina — another Eastern European, hailing from the Republic of Bashkortostan in Russia — sang the title role. Within a few bars, it was crystal clear why she has become the world’s foremost Carmen at a mere 27 years of age. Her singing was effortless and spicy; she blazed, sparked, and smoldered, her warm voice displaying a range of delicious colors and textures. She inhabited the role with ease and command, a magnetic presence both for the audiences and the men dogging Carmen. Her bravado cracked, however, when Don José manhandled her in the last three acts and when her cards foretold her death, making the Card Trio one of the show’s most riveting moments. Met audiences should look forward to getting a fuller picture of her compelling skills when she sings Il Barbiere di Siviglia and Samson et Dalila here soon.
Aigul Akhmetshina and Piotr Beczała in Carmen (Ken Howard/Met Opera)
Though Piotr Beczała’s voice still had a slight edge due to the bout of coronavirus that forced him to miss opening night, it fit his superb Don José. Considering how genial Piotr is when offstage, his characteristically committed portrayal was remarkable for its hot-blooded intensity and José’s convincing fall from a small-town mama’s boy to a femicidal criminal. Remarkable by any standard, really. There is good reason why he is perhaps the Met’s best-loved tenor.
Angel Joy Blue nearly ran away with the show with her pristinely perfect rendition of Micaëla’s Act 3 aria, “Je dis que rien ne m’épouvante” (I say that nothing frightens me). I do not say perfect lightly. With her glowing voice and beaming smile, Angel was… well, angelic. The theater audience began applauding the moment she stopped singing, before the orchestra had finished playing. While Micaëla is often portrayed as meek and timid, Angel gave her strength by shoving a soldier away with her suitcase to escape the ill-meaning officers and helping Carmen up when Don José throws her down.
Angel Blue surrounded by officers in Carmen (Ken Howard/Met Opera)
Kyle Ketelsen embodied the toreador Escamillo (now a celebrity rodeo champion) with swagger and confidence, giving out selfies like Oprah Winfrey: “YOU get a selfie, and YOU get a selfie and YOU get a selfie!” As Carmen’s comrade Frasquita, the delicate cream of Sydney Mancasola’s soprano was an unexpected treat, and Dancer Alison Clancy was an effective Manuelita.
Somehow, we’ve gotten this far without talking about Carrie Cracknell’s production, which was soundly panned by critics. I am generally contemptuous of contemporary anything, but in this instance, it turns out that critics just love to criticize (but we knew that already). Although I jotted down boring within 10 minutes — I don’t write at live opera —, the staging grew on me. After the first act, it graduated to “serviceable,” and once home, I wrote “overall the staging worked.” Yes, it is uniformly ugly, save for Carmen’s turquoise cowboy boots, but Cracknell does offer a much-needed modern critique of the power imbalance between men and women. My mother said that this is the first time she actually understood Carmen, both the opera and the woman, and she is not an easy audience. As Carmens go, this is remarkably tame; at its most suggestive, Carmen and Don José kiss passionately several times, and the “dance” that she does for him is just the two of them sitting on gas pumps, pointlessly taking turns running a knife over her bare leg.
HOWEVER, though there’s little steam, danger lurks everywhere for women. Micaëla just barely escapes the officers, who ogle every woman in sight, and Carmen has to fend off some particularly brazen blokes. Carmen is comfortable in her own skin and confident in her ability to land any man she wants. What’s harder, however, is to keep the men she doesn’t want away. “No” should be enough, but it’s not for Don José. Cracknell’s indictment of gender violence extends to its silent enablers; Micaëla is the only one who moves to help Carmen in Act 3, a security guard passes by Carmen and José during their final confrontation without blinking, and after José kills her with one blow from a baseball bat, the women in the rodeo arena stand up while the men stay sitting down. Silence is complicity — and not just in opera.
Truck dancing in 2024: Carmen (Ken Howard/Met Opera)
There’s also just plain danger. Guns are everywhere, and as a member of a generation plagued with gun violence, I must say I was uncomfortable. There are at least five fights: Carmen vs. Manuelita, Team Carmencita vs. Team Manuelita, Don José vs. Zuñiga, Don José vs. Escamillo, and Carmen vs. Don José. Don José isn’t meant to be much of a sweetheart in this one, even in the beginning, which begs the question of why the line that José’s mother “forgives” was omitted from the subtitles. The smugglers capture Zuñiga and duct-tape him up, and judging from their postures, the guns held aloft, and Carmen’s blithe throat-cutting gesture to Mercèdes, I think they may have killed him the second the curtain dropped.
Twice, the musical and visual dissonance was such that I had to look away to be able to sway to the rhythm. The first time was during “Les tringles des sistres tintaient,” the chanson bohème, when Carmen and Co. sing and dance in their stolen truck. Dancing makes sense, as the song is extremely catchy and I can never hear it without bopping along. The dancing in this production, however, is very 21st-century, which means it’s horrible. (Take it from a teen.) It’s just exorcism-esque wild shaking, without any beauty, which is a pity because “Les tringles” is absorbingly pretty. The second time was during “Les voici,” when the invisible toreadors rodeo champions enter. Instead, three clowns entertained the crowd, the latter occasionally doing “the wave”. This is perhaps Carmen’s most musically glorious moment, but it just looked annoying. After all the “killer clown” movies in the last few years, plus the existing general distaste, who even likes clowns anymore? Not I.
Clowns and convulsions aside, it was a visually thoughtful and vocally stupendous performance, and I regret not having been to see it live. At the end of the day, Verdi’s words to Giulio Gatti-Casazza, the Met’s general manager a century ago, still ring true: “If the public comes, the object is attained. The theater is intended to be full, and not empty.” Carmen sold out, so there you go.
