What is there left to say about one of the planet’s most popular operas (number two, according to Operabase), especially in Latin America and especially in Guadalajara, a city of opera nuts who typically buy out each and every production of “Carmen,” which drips with high drama and is studded with some of the best known music in the world?
Well, plenty, considering that the stage direction for this weekend’s performances at the Teatro Degollado has been imaginatively carried out by the boyish looking but acclaimed Ragnar Conde and considering its distinguished, international cast, with principal singers from Latvia, Sicily, Chile and Mexico.
Worldwide, “Carmen” has been produced in countless variants, including movies and Sesame Street’s famous singing orange segment. Here, it has been done regularly in full and scaled-back productions, in Guadalajara’s bull ring, in opera galas and more. But there is nothing scaled back about this weekend’s presentation with its legions of adult and child singers, its breathtaking scenes of flamenco dancing, and its stage and prop design — a puzzle-like rotating platform and four cobwebish structures, which some call complex yet minimalist and which give the opera a rustic or even decadent feel. (If you are high enough to see it, the blood-evoking stage floor is another scenic gem.)
With four acts totaling three and a half hours, this production of “Carmen,” as one wag pointed out, is similar to an American football game. But few football games boast this much melodrama, which, with the exception of Carmen’s bewitched flower that snags Don José, may remind you of your own love life at its worst.
Checking advance publicity, some observers wondered whether the anthropologically interesting characterization of untamable gypsy culture that was so important in the play by Merimée (on which Georges Bizet based his opera) would once again be swamped by the tired interpretation of Carmen as a slut. Opera goers will have to judge for themselves, perhaps by counting the scenes in which Carmen puts her hands on her hips, but the sweetly pretty Sicilian mezzosoprano José Maria Lo Monaco, who makes a fine Carmen, does not seem to fall easily into the role of bad girl and effectively accents Carmen’s positive traits, such as her valiance in the face of death.
High praise — in the form of gasps and adoring screams from the nearly sold-out house Wednesday night — were given to soprano Maija Kovalevska in the role as jilted good girl Micaela, especially after the third-act aria, in which she pleads with God for strength during her trials. Such enthusiasm was not entirely surprising in a devoutly Catholic country, although the loveliness of Kovalevska’s voice is undeniable and the Teatro Degollado’s famed acoustics carried it to every far nook and cranny.
Chilean tenor Giancarlo Monsalve, in the role of the love-ruined soldier Don José, was also a heart-stopper, as well as the other member of the love quadrangle of “Carmen” — the bullfighter Escamillo, played by charismatic Mexican baritone Luis Ledesma, who now resides in Philadelphia.
Chorus alto Debra Rodriguez, on this, her fifth time doing “Carmen,” called stage director Conde’s and scenery design ‘Mosco’ Aguilar’s work “amazing” and noted the “constant flux” of movement on stage, including slow- and stop-motion scenes and — stop reading now if you don’t want to know the ending — the ingenious foreshadowing in the opening scene of Carmen’s eventual murder by the jilted Don José.