Reviews 2005
Reviews 2005
✭✭✭✩✩
by Georges Bizet, directed by Mark Lamos
Canadian Opera Company, Hummingbird Centre, Toronto
September 29-October 5, 2005
For the 2016 production of Carmen, click here.
The Canadian Opera Company’s new production of Carmen (seen September 29, 2005), a co-production with Opéra de Montréal and San Diego Opera, is lively, straightforward and colorful. Unfortunately, both Russian mezzo-soprano Larissa Kostiuk as Carmen and Romanian tenor Atilla B. Kiss as Don José sported dodgy French diction and seemed ill-suited to the demands of Mark Lamos’s stage direction.
Lamos, set designer Michael Yeargan, and costume designer François St-Aubin have transposed the action, to little point, to 1940s Latin America. The banana republic setting casts an undesirably satiric light on the events. Indeed, for the first three acts the look and the direction would suit La Périchole just as well. Only in Act IV, when Carmen and Don José meet under massive bleachers of Yeargan’s bull-ring, does the design fully reinforce the contrast between private tragedy and public gaiety.
Kostiuk has a beautiful voice, full and rich yet clear and melodic even in its lowest register. Her vocal and physical portrayals of Carmen were bizarrely incompatible. While her singing conjured up a Carmen of elegance and guile, on stage she was ill at ease, self-conscious and awkward, in neither case a fiery force of nature. It was no favor to Kostiuk that Lamos plays up Carmen’s vulgarity at the expense of her mystery. Only from the Card Scene on when we are given a glimpse into Carmen’s inner life did Kostiuk’s temperament and refined vocal quality begin to accord with her onstage actions. Then effect was chilling.
As for Kiss, he has immense lung-power in service of a piercing, relentlessly nasal tone. His single method of conveying emotion, whether love, rage or jealousy, was to stare vacantly into space, even when supposedly addressing someone on stage, thus eliminating any hope of chemistry between the two lovers.
Spanish soprano Ana Ibarra sang beautifully as Micaëla but showed a strange reluctance to hold her top notes, leaving it to charismatic Brazilian Paulo Szot as a David Beckham-like Escamillo to steal the show with his muscular baritone and clear diction. Like Ibarra and Szot, Canadians Peter Barrett (Le Dancaïre), Michèle Bogdanowicz (Mercédès), Alain Coulombe (Zuniga), Virgina Hatfield (Frasquita), Joshua Hopkins (Morales), and Lawrence J. Wiliford (Le Remendado) each created a stronger impression from the first, both vocally and dramatically, than the two hapless leads and had the French to make the spoken dialogue a pleasure. Under conductor Richard Bradshaw the COC Orchestra’s account of the score was at once beautifully transparent and vibrantly lush.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: A version of this review appeared in Opera News 2005-12.
Photo: Alain Coulombe and Larissa Kostiuk. ©Michael Cooper.
2005-09-30
Carmen