Word: carmens
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Georges Bizet's Carmen is an opera rapt with passion, where conflicts of love and loyalty, hope and despair play roles as large as the individual characters themselves. The story of Don Jose, a corporal in the Spanish army torn between his duty and his love for the seductive and dangerous Carmen, this work has virtually shaped the myth of romantic 19th-century Spain...
...dramas like Anna Christie -- ponderous artifacts stocked with sullen, logorrheic characters -- are so often revived, with such imposing casts. Jason Robards has long fanned the flame on Broadway, / and London has seen many winning revivals: the Glenda Jackson Strange Interlude, Desire Under the Elms with Colin Firth and Carmen Du Sautoy, A Touch of the Poet with Timothy Dalton and Vanessa Redgrave. Actors love digging to the core of a role, no matter how long it takes; and O'Neill's plays, which idle in dour exposition before revving into revelation, let them reproduce that effort every night. For playgoers...
...production conducted by Barenboim in 1994; the Met's Cosi fan tutte the following season. Bartoli is happily caught up in her repertory, but her fans, as well as many opera managers, already ache to see her expand it. Why not the big-money operas -- Verdi and, above all, Carmen...
...Verdi, Bartoli says, "Never!" Carmen has been offered by several houses and turned down -- at least until she is in her 30s. The wise men who hover over her career, like Barenboim and Levine, hope she sticks to her resolve. The fact is that, lovely as her voice is, it is not large. But 26 is very young. It is nearly impossible to predict how a voice will develop; the supreme Wagnerian Kirsten Flagstad sang operetta in her 20s. "You must never force," Bartoli insists. "The test is after the concert: Is the voice still fresh so that you could...
...long second act McNally moves his play into more maudlin, paranoid territory; the Callas arias get louder, the dialogue grows tense, and eventually Stephen's obsessive behavior culminates in a crime of passion lifted directly from Carmen...