For BLO, a potent new chamber ‘Carmen’

November 07, 2009|Jeremy Eichler, Globe Staff

Boston Lyric Opera’s general director Esther Nelson has promised more homegrown new productions for the company, and she is keeping her word. Last night at the Shubert Theatre, BLO opened its season with a new “Carmen,’’ presented in a stripped-down, theatrically intense staging by Nicholas Muni.

The director seemed out to prove that, at least scenically speaking, less can be more. This production does away with spectacles like the grand Act IV parade outside the bullring in favor of focusing attention on the powder keg of a relationship at the opera’s heart. This is “Carmen,’’ in other words, meant as explosive chamber opera. Helping this production make its case and adding to its novelty is the company’s wise choice to restore Bizet’s original spoken dialogue in place of the better-known recitatives that the composer Ernest Guiraud interpolated in the mid-1870s. The dialogue helps the opera breathe, fleshes out characters, and adds to its theatrical vividness.

Unfortunately, they also add to its length, and BLO made the fateful choice of drastically cutting roughly 30 minutes of music from the score. The most iconic numbers are all there, but anyone who knows the opera well will feel the loss of so much beautiful connecting tissue, not to mention a slight sense of disorientation at how fast it all goes by. (The famous “Toreador Song,’’ an Act II landmark, is reached at breakneck speed, some 40 minutes into the opera.)

Heading the cast was Dana Beth Miller as a compelling Carmen who, after some initial vocal choppiness, warmed up nicely into the role. Her voice is full of alluringly dark colorings and has a heavier weighting well-suited to her character’s tragic dimensions. John Bellemer’s Don Jose was vocally assured and lyrical, if at times missing a few degrees of dramatic urgency. Hanan Alattar was an able Micaela, offering more than just an innocent foil to Carmen’s dark power. Daniel Mobbs made a particularly strong impression as Escamillo, managing to convey the required virility and flair in his first entrance while at the same time nursing an abdominal wound. Darren Stokes was a solid Zuniga, and the smaller roles were all capably sung. In the pit, certain moments in Act IV called for a stronger dramatic profile, but Keith Lockhart by and large led the orchestra honorably through a score that Nietzsche, of all people, described as perfect.