![]() (Jose refuses they draw Zuniga is disarmed by the smugglers.) The ending to Act II is highly effective, with Carmen and Jose standing obdurately centre stage, behind them the smugglers. ![]() They were already at loggerheads before Zuniga’s (Sebastian Soules) call on Jose. He swears his love, but he would desert and follow her, if he really loved her. He has to go they’re fighting she taunts him. Their foreplay is interrupted by army bugle calls. #Carmen opera vienna skin#She dances for him wearing a skin tight black cat suit. In her reunion with Jose, Carmen’s all over him. Jose returns- after two months’ prison for aiding Carmen’s escape. Momtazeri’s Jose and Peebo’s Carmen do have that charisma and chemistry. And isn’t Holocek just a little too big to bullfight? That’s how they meet, (eye contact) but I didn’t get the sense of a relationship between them. Carmen, in bright red blouse and tight black pants, right of stage, swigging on a bottle. Escamillo and admirers are on a table left stage. Holocek’s baritone has depth, ballast, but has a limited range (upper register).īut the staging is again very effective. Boasting of his success in the Ring, with women on each side- to his ecstatic fans’ delight- he delivers his signature tune, the Toreador Song. So Sebastian Holecek, like a pop idol, wears a bright green suit, black shirt, and pink tie. The toreador, he’s meant to be the popular hero, and celebrity. In a dramatic entrance, Escamillo descends from a central iron staircase. ![]() Peebo, (mezzo-soprano) is slightly lacking in upper range, but the orchestra is on frenzied form. Led by Carmen, they sing a robust Spanish gypsy song. Carmen and her gypsy friends, in riotously multi-coloured outfits, are entertaining the officers. Mehrzad Montazeri as Don Jose, very handsome, with jet black Spanish/Moorish hair, has a richly timbred tenor, albeit a little insecure in the opening Act.Īct II’s Lillas Pastia’s tavern is seedy and atmospheric, absinthe pump in the background. Very clever, the twilight having suggested liminal sexual allure. The lights come on as Carmen is repulsed. She plucks a rose from the garlanded stage proscenium, and throws it at Don Jose, the only man she knows isn’t interested. Now the lights are dimmed as if Carmen is performing in a sleasy night club. She sits on soldiers’ laps (like in a bordello). Carmen perches on a chair to show off her legs. In her provocative Habanera, she’s like a sex bomb. She wears see-through back lace over a bright red skirt. Annely Peebo is black-haired, gypsy like. When the cigarette girls storm out of the factory, they’re in low-cut, silky, tobacco coloured dresses -colour coded to contrast with the soldiers. Its exotic rhythms and harmonies suggest dangerous sexual temptation and social subversion. In the opera’s musical dichotomy- the stylistic division in the score- Bizet’s ‘Spanish’ music is allocated exclusively for Carmen and her gypsy friends. ![]() Micaela’s arias, charmingly sung by Kaiser, are in the French operatic tradition, and influenced musically by Gounod. Carrying a woven shopping bag, she is respectable, bourgeois, representing virtuous ‘family’ values: the very antithesis of the colourful, immoral Carmen, the ‘gypsy woman’ outsider. Kaiser has short auburn hair, plaited, and wears a sobre light blue skirt. Micaela (Kristiane Kaiser), who has come looking for Don Jose, spurns the soldiers’ playful taunts. ![]() From the (opening) drab guardroom, the soldiers’ bright yellow shirts cleverly match the yellow screen highlighting Sevilia bullfighting posters. Brahms saw it twenty times, and even Wagner admired it (Gerald Larner).Ĭertainly the staging of this Vienna Volksoper Carmen (Johannes Leiacker, original production Guy Joosten), could hardly have been bettered. But Bizet’s Carmen sung in German? Yet, after the early 1876 Opera Comique version was initially withdrawn,´it was in Vienna where -in a ‘Grand Opera’ version- (dialogue replaced by recitatives)- that Carmen first enjoyed huge success. Volksoper, Vienna’s home of operetta, also has an increasing international reputation as opera house- overhadowed by Vienna State Opera as English National is by Covent Garden. ![]()
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