Carmen
G. Bizet

Set design........Rifail Ajdarpasic
Costume design........Patrick Dutertre
Light design........Fabrice Kebour
Choreography........Ana García
Conductor........Claude Schnitzler

première: 28 January 2011 Metz, France
compamy: Opéra Nationale de Lorraine / Opéra Metz

1st revival 15 october 2011 Duisburg, Germany
company: Deutsche Oper am Rhein

Reviews

Exemplary Carmen
The Carmen of the Opera of Nancy opens up thrilling perspectives. Despite a few awkward moments, the production of Carlos Wagner proposes a powerfully aesthetic point of view for a much thrashed out work: a pictorial Carmen, dominated by a superbly lit black monochrome, accentuating the universal tragedy of a subject where the local colour blends with the mythical. After all these years where Béatrice Uria Monzon was the only one to present a French Carmen, the replacement is now here, and beautifully so: after Stéphanie d’Oustrac, here is Isabelle Druet, in Nancy, for a captivating feminine portrait.

Le Figaro

Carmen invades Lorraine
When the two enemy sisters, Metz and Nancy associate, the result can be most successful. See the admirable co production of Carmen.  Here one is far away from the kind of “spanishery” to which one is often subjected with the masterpiece by Bizet. Contrary to widespread belief (probably due to the famous melodies which have all become hits) we see here a piece which is more problematic to present than it seems. The traps are numerous, both on a vocal level and on a scenic one. The opera of Metz and Lorraine turned to Carlos Wagner. His staging is very faithful to the text, but reveals itself both innovative and subtle, guiding us towards the drama with great accuracy. A fatalism that expresses itself through a set made of lava only lit when necessary, like in Goya. Supported by very elegant, perfectly adapted costumes, the whole is a succession of good ideas, of anachronisms even, that surprise, but always do so for good reason. Thus the red balloons that symbolize the love of the suitor, the air of Escamillo transformed into a photo shoot, the death of Carmen by a Don José that metamorphoses into a minotaur, and above all the children’s chorus of Metz, made into a true object of stage direction, both funny and precise, avoiding the common custom of reducing them to mere puppets… A tragic and black spectacle, entertaining, with some welcome spots of comedy. One is here in the timelessness of a love drama, the freedom of one of the characters juxtaposed with the dependence of another.

Figaro Magazine

In this exceptional production of the Opéra National de Lorraine, the Venezuelan Carlos Wagner, new darling of stage direction, wanted Goya rather than Mérimée.
It is an evil lugubrious and brutal Carmen, that shows men manhandling women without mercy and treating them like bitches, a sinister inn keeper, smugglers that don’t appear to rejoice in their freedom that is sham anyway, so heavy are they of body and soul: robbed of the charm of an exotic Spain such as the 19th century drama enveloped them in. One is there, symbolically, in the cave of the Minotaur, eye to eye with the darkest myths of the Mediterranean, a set of blackened walls, rough, compact, immediately suffocating: a true corridor of death.
At first, the treatment seems somewhat forced, almost overdone: why does Carmen appear in transparent black lace, among the cigarette workers who are all in beige underwear? Why is  Micaëla reduced to this clumsy character in the first act, with a teddy bear in her rucksack? Why are the soldiers so threatening to her, when the text and the music paints them more charmingly? One is a little irritated, but one waits, having a premonition of an inexorable rise in power. It comes, one enjoys the acute psychological finesse which enlightens the heavy backdrop: as when Carmen, discovering Micaëla, having come to bring José back to his mother, encircles the girl by inspecting her both mocking and intrigued by this specimen from another world.
The climax of the drama is obviously the last act, when Don José appears disposing bulls carcasses from the arena, bare-chested under his apron of an abattoir worker, already smeared with blood, and one is almost asphyxiated to see him donning the bulls head to gore Carmen, who emerged from her flounced dress to face him in a matadors outfit. Nightmarish visions, which could fall into the ridiculous, were they not breathed life into by the actors and the subtlety of gesture.

concert classique

Opera event
Metz presents the new Carmen of Carlos Wagner
This is an astonishing Carmen with relentless tension, in a fascinating pictorial concept (many references amongst other things to the black romanticism of Goya). For Carlos Wagner, Carmen is a larger-than-life creature for the sergeant Don Jose; fatal, certainly sensual, but above all free spirited and conquering, fascinated by the splendour of the bullfighter Escamillo, and the brilliance of his costume that faces the bull in the arena… For the rest, the vision presented clarifies in a new way, the relationship between Carmen and her idol, the slow descent into Hell of Don Jose, overwhelmed, destroyed… the last image is in this sense unforgettable, and proves the blazing imagination of a very great director, between truth and aspiration, poetry and expressionnism, shade and light…

Classiquenews