Opera-comique in 4 acts by Georges Bizet, libretto by Henri Meilhac & Ludovic Halévy after Prosper Mérimée
Conductor : Gianandrea Noseda - Director : Andreas Homoki
Opernhaus Zürich, April 10th 2024
 | |
Should you go? No. If you've seen it before, you've seen better, if you haven't, you deserve a better Carmen and that's not hard to find. Why? Gianandrea Noseda and Andreas Homoki did a great job with Wagner's Ring cycle in the last seasons, but somehow they stumble on the easier, less sophisticated Carmen. Noseda conducts too fast and smothers the score (for some parts, "butchers" is even more appropriate), like he tried to make Bizet's Carmen sound like Lehar's Merry Widow. The cast does an adequate job but apart from Saimir Pirgu who impresses as Don José, no sparks to speak of. Homoki's direction is at the beginning rudderless and off-topic (is it a play within a play? is it a riff on #metoo? or is Carmen a dominatrix?), then bland and boring. The set, pretentiously claimed to evoke the original set design of the creation, signs Homoki's return to bland, dull, dark, featureless stages. Despite this uninspired and confused take on his work, Carmen remains Carmen and is still not unpleasant, which is to the credit of Bizet's genius, but damn, what an utterly bland mess they made of his work! Swann |
No comments:
Post a Comment