The latest of several strong Covent Garden revivals of core repertoire this season, this Carmen may be the best of the lot. The new run has two outstanding things going for it, in the shape of Mark Elder’s conducting and Aigul Akhmetshina’s return to the title role. But there is plenty of vigorous underpinning elsewhere, particularly in the energy of its largely youthful cast.
Damiano Michieletto’s 2024 production, revived here under Dan Dooner, is an improvement on Barrie Kosky’s bold but ill-judged 2018 effort to purge Carmen of almost all of its Spanishness. Michieletto’s modern-day Spain, however, is a flyblown place, with not a cathedral or a bullring in sight, and none of the horses of even earlier productions here either – this is a place where life is fierce, lawless and precarious.
Some minor things jar. There is too much aimless milling in crowd scenes. A non-speaking actor haunts the production in mourning black, presumably Don José’s mother, adding little. A gaggle of kids, disturbingly violent in act one, then do a series of cutesy turns while the curtain is lowered for scene changes.
But these do little to lower the impact. Akhmetshina, in particular, is one of the best Covent Garden Carmens in decades, bright voiced but a true mezzo, untroubled by Carmen’s often low-lying vocal line, looking and inhabiting the part, and carrying off her many famous numbers with panache.
She is not quite matched by Freddie De Tommaso’s more stolid and repressed José. The tenor doesn’t capture José’s naive allure in the early scenes but he impressed increasingly in the Flower song, and was on vocal home ground in the dark impassioned fervour of Bizet’s remarkable closing scene.
Yaritza Véliz, like Akhmetshina, an alumna of the Royal Opera’s Jette Parker Artists Programme with a now blossoming career of her own, brought rapt urgency to Micaëla’s vain pleadings with José. Marianna Hovanisyan and Ryan Vaughan Davies led the smugglers’ crisp exchanges and Jamie Woollard added a fine streak of cynicism as José’s superior officer Zuniga.
On the podium, Elder found breadth and seriousness as well as colour and atmosphere in Bizet’s score. Quicker scenes tripped along, with phrasing sharply pointed. But Elder has spent enough years in the opera pit to also know when to slow down and give his singers space. The Royal Opera House orchestra played beautifully for him, none more so than the flute solo at the start of act three.
• At Royal Opera House, London, until 3 July.
