A confession: I generally dread the arrival of the Toreador Song in Carmen. It’s been so overplayed and it’s become so hackneyed that directors and singers alike seem unable to take it seriously. But at Glyndebourne’s season opener, Dmitry Cheblykov turned it into a glorious piece of theatre. We could have been watching Mick Jagger in his prime working an adoring festival crowd into a frenzy. Cheblykov swaggered, he glad-handed, he capered about the stage – the epitome of the alpha male supremely self-confident that everyone is eating out of his hand. Cheblykov's baritone matched his movement, deep and full in the big entries, switching to a perfect pianissimo for that moment when the crowd goes silent before the bull is to charge.
Cheblykov had help. For the whole evening, Robin Ticciati and the London Philharmonic Orchestra knocked it out of the park, somewhere deep into the surrounding countryside. The sheer quality of instrumental colour was magnificent (the flute and harp prelude to Act 3 had me swooning). From the very beginning, Ticciati wasn’t shy of taking the pace at a gallop, confident that his players would maintain crystal clarity throughout. Accenting was deep, carrying us with the action. Ticciati found every nuance in Bizet's score.
Just as telling was the work of director Diane Paulus. The stage movement of singers and chorus was expertly calibrated to portray the passions of a crowd working itself to fever pitch. The whole scene was simply mesmerising. Paulus repeated the trick in Act 4 with the bullfight crowd; you didn’t have to know what a picador or banderillero was to be caught up in the torrents of enthusiasm coming from children and adults alike.
After the Toreador Song, Act 2 just kept getting better. The smugglers’ plotting was turned into a delicious comic relief interlude with an almost music-hall flair, all of Kezia Bienek, Elisabeth Boudreault, Loïc Félix and François Piolino playing their parts to perfection. It set things up perfectly for the crisis moment when it becomes clear to Carmen that Don José is not the man she thought he was, not the lover to sweep her away on a white charger – and then, with the entry of the drunken Zuniga, the action became even grittier.
Paulus does something very unusual for an opera director of today. She sticks to the libretto like glue while creating visuals that make the work seem as if it was written yesterday. There are no liberties taken with the surtitle translations and almost every line of text is illustrated by something happening on stage, from the very beginning – when the soldiers are watching, threateningly, the “strange sorts of people” passing by – through to Act 4 with the bullring in the background. Dialogue lines are minimally cut, which allows Estéban Lecoq’s Lillas Pastia to run the whole show in Act 2, whereas Felix's Le Dancaïre does the equivalent in Act 3, a perfect bandit-in-charge.
Set designer Riccardo Hernández and costume designer Evie Gurney certainly know how to set up a tableau. The curtain rise drew gasps: assault-rifle toting soldiers in fatigues and forage caps on a high wall, the space of the town square inverted so that the cigarette girls are inside a wire cage, perhaps for their own protection. Lillas Pastia’s club was a masterpiece of sleazy glamour; the bullring crowd a blaze of colour.
At the core of the tragedy are Carmen and Don José, and both Rihab Chaieb and Dmytro Popov sang well throughout. Chaieb’s Habanera and Seguidilla may not have been the biggest showstoppers, but her voice was strong and her stage presence magnetic. Chaieb was a sexier Carmen than you will see in many a year. Popov’s tenor is relatively light in timbre, but the notes were true and he could certainly turn up the intensity. His “La fleur que tu m’avais jetée” was remarkable, a glorious combination of lyrical beauty and pathos. Sofia Fomina provided an excellent foil as Micaëla, her intervention to spirit Don José away at the end of Act 3 delivered with immense power and dignity.
Perhaps the most telling aspects of the evening were how clearly the dramatic arc was delineated and how readily we could imagine the characters today. For the first half of the opera, Carmen is in charge, shamelessly using her sexuality to manipulate Don José, but then things shift to the polar opposite, with José as the stereotype of a violent stalker and abuser. Chaieb and Popov acted the closing scene brilliantly, with Carmen seeming so hell-bent on self-destruction that you are desperate to tell her “Stop this, just run!” and Don José’s intrinsic violence overcoming him. Forget the Iberian glitz, this was a proper tragedy.
