Word: carmens
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...been to Boston, Houston, Philadelphia, Chicago, Pittsburgh, Santa Fe, and the White House twice, once for a memorable concert featuring the American debut of a long-lost Mozart symphony. Last week found Walsh in Paris to review Peter Brook's idiosyncratic new production of Bizet's opera Carmen. "I don't mind the travel at all," says Walsh. "It's part of what makes the job of TIME music critic so rewarding. I can go anywhere in the world where there is a major musical event...
...whistles of the Gare du Nord. Its inside walls are crumbling. Its seats are long, hard wooden benches, and the stage is nothing more than a dirt floor. Yet this unprepossessing site is currently selling the hottest ticket in Paris: to Director Peter Brook's radical version of Carmen, Georges Bizet's classic opera of love and death in old Seville...
Like the theater in which it is playing, called the Bouffes du Nord, this is a stripped-down, no-frills Carmen far removed from traditional opera-house conventions. It lasts just 82 minutes, with no interval, and uses only four singers, plus two speaking actors. The full orchestra has been reduced to 15 musicians. Everything unnecessary to the plot has been jettisoned in an effort to return to the sunbaked spirit of the original Prosper Mérimée novella. Gone are the choruses of soldiers and cigarette girls, as well as most of the opera's secondary...
This, of course, is nonsense. Usually what the composer puts down on paper is what he had in mind. True, opera librettos have occasionally been censored (as was Verdi's Rigoletto), and sometimes the exigencies of performance required certain concessions in the music itself. Carmen, a failure when it was first performed at the Opéra Comique in 1875, was outfitted after Bizet's death with recitatives by Ernest Guiraud to replace its original spoken dialogue. But this did not change the essential character of the composer's conception...
What Brook has produced is not Carmen, but a critical commentary on Carmen-an opera about an opera. In this he has succeeded. In the 550-seat Bouffes du Nord, the drama has more power than it possibly could in a 3,000-seat opera house. Brook has chosen his singers as much for their acting skills as for their voices. By tightening the plot he creates dramatic situations beyond anything envisioned by Bizet's librettists (Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy) or even by Mérim&233;e. In this version, Carmen and Micaela...