Bizet – Carmen

Carmen – Gaëlle Arquez
Don José – François Rougier
Micaëla – Sabine Devieilhe
Escamillo – Thomas Dolié
Frasquita – Margot Genet
Mercédès – Séraphine Cotrez
Moralès – Yoann Dubruque
Le Dancaïre – Emiliano González Toro
Remendado – Grégoire Mour
Zuniga – Frédéric Caton
Lilas Pastia – Karolos Zouganelis

Kinderkoor Opera Ballet Vlaanderen, Chœur de chambre de Namur, B’Rock Orchestra / René Jacobs.
Concert Performance.

Philharmonie, Cologne, Germany.  Sunday, March 17th, 2024.

René Jacobs conducting Carmen.  Not words one might expect to read, given the acclaim Jacobs has received in earlier music, not least his seminal Mozart opera recordings, ones that quite literally changed my life and the way that I look at Mozart’s music.  I was intrigued, then, to see what he would achieve with Bizet’s score and if the results would be similarly insightful.  This Carmen forms part of a tour, with performances also taking place in Antwerp, Madrid, and Paris, France.  It’s an exceptionally intensive tour for the cast, with another performance in Dortmund last night, which meant this was the second evening in the row that these performers were on stage in these roles.

It was billed as a concert performance but what we got was something much more than that.  There was no director credited in the Cologne program book, but we saw living, breathing dramatic assumptions throughout the entire cast.  The orchestra was placed in the centre of the action, with the principals and choruses performing in front of, and around, them.  The principals and choruses were costumed appropriately, whether in vaguely military garb for the soldiers, dark clothes for the smugglers, while Frasquita and Mercédès came along attired in tenue de gala for the final act.  It all worked extremely well, bringing the performance very much to life, showing us that this was an exceptionally rehearsed musical and dramatic vision of the work. 

These performances coincide with the release of a new critical edition of the opera by Bärenreiter, which combines the numerous versions of the work into a single volume, allowing performers to choose which version of Carmen they wish to perform.  Jacobs opted for the 1874 version which includes spoken dialogues.  There are also a number of differences to what we may expect.  We lose the Act 4 prelude, a real shame as it’s one of my favourite pages of the score, and we also lose the celebrated habanera, with Carmen instead being given a different entrance aria.  It struck me that this gave Carmen’s character a very different profile to what we normally see.  The ‘original’ aria seems more argumentative, determined even, lacking in the free-spirited flirtatiousness of the habanera.  Often, the differences in version just seem to revolve around the presence of some additional measures of music – the cigarette girls’ chorus has much more interplay between them and the soldiers, but also makes the ‘mais nous ne voyons pas, la Carmencita’ less impactful, as the previous chorus had gone on for much longer. 

Furthermore, José’s killing of Carmen seems to pass by unnoticed as his interjections are less pronounced in this version of the final scene.  That said, I did appreciate hearing José’s entrance in Act 2 given with the musical material of the ‘Dragon d’Alcala’ more fully developed.  Still, I left with the overriding impression that Bizet discarded the material he did for a reason, and while I very much appreciated having the chance to hear this version, the later version remains one of my very favourite operas.  The dialogues were given fluently, but the singers were not amplified during their spoken sections – and I do wonder how much was audible to those further back.  Indeed, the acoustic of the hall was rather problematic, designed as it is like an open fan.  There were times when some of the cast were barely audible from my seat, around a dozen rows back from the stage, both in song and in speech.

As Jacobs launched into that celebrated overture, there was a real sense of hearing the years of grime being removed from this fabulous score and presented as new.  The way that the strings of the B’Rock orchestra phrased the first hearing of the toreador theme, with minimal vibrato and generous portamenti, was simply magical.  Jacobs tempi were generally sensible, although having the dialogues not being optimally audible did mean that tension had a tendency to dip – an aspect I don’t think would have been as prominent in a more helpful acoustic.  Jacobs led the ‘chanson bohème’ most seductively, starting from an extremely slow opening, gradually building up with inexorable momentum in a way that was so irresistible, frankly I was tempted to get up and start gyrating.  He kept his disparate forces together with impeccable accuracy, despite their active moving around the stage.  The orchestral playing was absolutely superb.  The sound of the period winds was revelatory, so full of character, including the spicy clarinets and raspy bassoons.  The horns were a little bit accident-prone, but not unexpected perhaps.  The orchestral sound was founded in a warm, rich bass, helped by having the double-basses positioned on both sides of the stage, and the percussion felt even more immediate thanks to the wooden sticks.  The adult chorus, prepared by Thibaut Lenaerts, sang with the kind of volume that belied their relatively modest size, as well as excellent blend.  The children’s chorus, prepared by Hendrik Derolez, was sensational – delightfully boisterous and singing with staggering precision.  Jacobs invited soloists from the chorus to sing passages normally given to the full chorus, for example the ‘mais nous ne voyons pas la Carmencita’, or the interjections of the orange and program sellers at the start of Act 4, which gave notice of some mellifluous voices – though again, not always optimally audible in this acoustic. 

Gaëlle Arquez is a familiar interpreter of the title role.  She was extremely strong in the dialogue, savouring the words most seductively.  She’s a sultry stage presence, holding the stage through her physical presence and demeanour.  Vocally, her mezzo is in agreeable shape, easy on top, able to descend to some warmth on the bottom, although the chestiness was tastefully deployed, when one actually wished she would just let it rip.  She phrased her séguedille with improvisatory freedom, using Jacobs’ tempo to provide some lyrical melismas.  That said, that tendency that I have found in Arquez’ singing to sing over the words rather than with them, was also present here from Act 2 onwards.  I longed for her to bring out the beauty of the sung text in the way that she did in her delivery of the spoken dialogue, just in the way that more recent interpreters of this iconic role such as d’Oustrac or Lemieux have done.  Her big declaration ‘Libre elle est née et libre elle mourra’ lost impact simply because we heard an outburst of sound, agreeably impactful, rather than the passion of the text that this moment really required.  A shame, because her Act 1 led me to hope that she would really make something of the text, but as the evening progressed, the words were subsumed into the line.

As was the case in his Mozart opera series, Jacobs cast the principal roles with voices much lighter than we often hear.  Don José is a big sing for the tenor, even more so over two consecutive evenings such as this. François Rougier has sung the role before and he brought a sense of familiarity to it that was welcome.  His tenor is rather soft-grained, lacking the cutting power for his outburst at the end of Act 3, but with a smaller orchestra of period instruments, he was generally able to carry over the orchestral sound.  He sang his flower song with genuine introspection, with intelligent use of voix mixte in the higher reaches.  As the evening progressed, the tone became grainier, not unexpected with such a demanding schedule.  That said, I was impressed by his staying power and willing to give everything to the role.

Sabine Devieilhe brought her familiar crystalline soprano to the role of Micaëla.  She sang with admirable clarity of diction, although her tendency to use a guttural ‘r’ rather than a rolled one was not consistent with the pronunciation used by her colleagues.  Thanks to the smaller orchestral forces, she was able to soar quite magically in her aria.  Thomas Dolié is most definitely a baritone Escamillo, which meant that he negotiated the higher reaches of the role with ease.  He sang with an appropriate swagger, combined with easy, focused tone.  The remaining roles were decently taken.  Yoann Dubruque was a very handsomely-voiced Moralès, certainly a baritone I would like to hear more from.  Séraphine Cotrez sang Mercédès in an agreeably silky mezzo with easy reach, although Margot Genet’s Frasquita was unfortunately less than optimally audible in this acoustic.  Frédéric Caton sang Zuniga with a resonant bass, while Grégoire Mour and Emiliano González Toro were delightfully extrovert stage and vocal presences as the Remendado and Dancaïre. 

I found so much to enjoy in this evening’s Carmen.  On one level it was an absolutely fascinating rediscovery of a very familiar work and it would be hard to imagine an orchestral and choral performance better than what we heard tonight.  The presence of Jacobs’ intelligence in approach combined with the playing style and period instruments was revelatory.  The principals were cast with lighter voices than usual and this was aided by the smaller orchestral forces, although it was hindered on this occasion by the difficult acoustic of this particular venue.  Still, it was a fascinating evening and those joining subsequent performances in Hamburg and Madrid can look forward to an evening of revelations.