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.
