Past Production Reviews
3Musically, the performance rarely disappointed. Mark Ermler, music director of the Bolshoi Opera, knows this work intimately and proved it. His conducting caught the shadings of the first act and did what could be done to disguise the blatancy of the second. Sheri Greenawald was a more healthy and obvious Natasha than the role ideally requires, but she sang with her usual professionalism. The Soviet baritone Vladimir Chernov delivered Andrei's tortured monologues in clear-toned, almost tenorial upper tones and was believable as the gentle humanist and war-hater. Peter Kazaras as the perfect gentleman Pierre and James Hoback as that nasty little seducer Anatol also were persuasive.
Seattle Opera’s opening night performance brought the house to its feet even before the final orchestral cadences sounded, and Seattle critics doled out generous praise in the following day’s newspapers.
In the title role, Elena Maximova disappointed. She has the looks and moves for the part, power to burn and the right sort of dark colour in the voice. But a thick accent was allied to awful diction, with hardly a consonant intelligible all evening. I spent the evening struggling to work out the words from a combination of memory and back-translation of the surtitles, and that kills any possibility of being swept away by siren-like sexuality, which is required to make the whole opera plausible. Just like the singing, the orchestral performance was mixed. Bertrand de Billy kept things moving nicely and strings and woodwind gave good, precise performances: the prelude to Act III, when they’re playing on their own, was the orchestral highlight of the evening. But there were simply too many errors and hesitancies in brass and percussion: this is a score where anything less than immaculate timing of triangle or tambourine notes can throw the whole flow of the music. The result was an orchestral performance that was adequate without ever touching greatness. Zambello’s staging is appealing: her take on 19th century Seville is well lit and bustling, very much one’s ideal of a Hispanic city in the burning sun gathered from Zorro movies or elsewhere. But it gives a lot of rope on which a revival director can hang himself: there is a huge amount of movement on stage and it all needs to be executed crisply. Under the revival direction of Duncan Macfarland and choreography of Sirena Tocco, last night’s cast and chorus were good enough to execute it all correctly, but not good enough to give the sense of doing so with abandon. The defining example was extras abseiling down the walls, who landed with care rather than with a thump and a flourish; the exception was the Royal Opera Youth Company, with the children throwing themselves into the action with delightful abandon and brio. For anyone seeing Carmen for the first time, this production will have been a more than satisfactory evening. Old hands hoping to see something extra will find it in Hymel and Car, but not elsewhere.
