Young women strut around in hot pants and read their fate in the cards. Listless men in police uniform sweat, drool and rule. Spain, in the Royal Opera House’s Carmen, newly staged by Damiano Michieletto and conducted by Antonello Manacorda, is a semi-urban wasteland at the end of the General Franco era. A country long steeped in God, corrida and family has stumbled across modernity. Girls bare their midriffs and want freedom: a cry more urgent and credible in this mid-1970s updating than when Georges Bizet’s masterpiece was new a century earlier, in 1875 (and flopped).
With the world-class Russian mezzo-soprano Aigul Akhmetshina in the title role, the ROH has snapped up a dream Carmen. (A second cast will be led by another Russian, Vasilisa Berzhanskaya, from 12 May.) Still only 27, a former ROH Jette Parker artist, Akhmetshina inhabits the part in all its nuances. She shows vulnerability, is vocally athletic and physically compelling. Her virile but hapless Don José is Piotr Beczala; they have just sung the same roles together in Carrie Cracknell’s new Carmen at the New York Met. The Polish tenor’s gilded top notes match Akhmetshina’s own in energy and brilliance: he is deft at suggesting, in gesture and bearing, a man tight-knotted by duty and desire.
