Every opera company, large, small, private, public, urban or out of town, is preoccupied with the same dry equation: how to combine artistic ambition with financial reality. One answer will always be right. Georges Bizet’s Carmen. Box-office gold, this 1875 French masterpiece is everywhere. The Royal Opera’s new staging has an extended run. The opera will be a headline event at this year’s Edinburgh international festival. A new production by the American director Diane Paulus, conducted by Robin Ticciati, has opened Glyndebourne festival’s 90th anniversary season, with 21 performances (and a change of cast and conductor) between now and late August. With remaining seat prices from £85 to £285, you may find an £8 standing ticket, when Glyndebourne makes its annual visit to the Proms (29 August), more tempting.
Paulus presents the heroine as a woman who can shape her own destiny – not in itself a novelty, but handled here with nuance in a thoughtful, nonspecific updating: army garrison, lowlife night club, drilling rig in a bare landscape (designs by Riccardo Hernández, lighting by Malcolm Rippeth). Carmen, resonantly sung by the Tunisian-Canadian mezzo-soprano Rihab Chaieb, is far from an everywoman. She is singular: the centre of any crowd, with a magnetic, erotic hold over others. Women envy her. Men desire her. All fear her. The besotted Don José has none of the equivalent assets. He’s a mother’s boy with a dodgy past, a sweet fiance (Sofia Fomina), a flabby character and red-rage habit of violence. His long, lyrical, pleading aria to Carmen, the climax of which is a soaring top B flat (the Flower Song), is answered by her short, blunt rejection: Bizet at his most brilliant, creating the musical equivalent of a deadly chess move.
