patrikpen: Sensual and Immoral in Music and Vision 7 luglio

giovedì 9 novembre 2017

Sensual and Immoral in Music and Vision 7 luglio

Sensual and Immoral

A new production of 'Carmen'
stirs a mini-International Controversy,
by GIUSEPPE PENNISI

It might seem like an operetta. The Mexican Ambassador to the Italian Republic wrote a formal letter to the Italian Head of State and copied it to all the major newspapers, after the premiere (28 June 2017) of a new production of Bizet's Carmen. This was the opening night of the Summer Season at the Terme di Caracalla open air theater which is set within outstanding Roman ruins. The complaint was that the production was set in the present time, near to the wall being built to separate Mexico from the United States, as well as in the American Rushmore mountain and valley. I do not know whether the Italian Head of State took time to reply to the Ambassador. In my view, I would have believed equally laughable but more understandable a protest by the American Ambassador. In any event, Teatro dell'Opera di Roma is an independent organization and not part of the public administration.

A scene from Bizet's 'Carmen' at Teatro dell'Opera di Roma. Photo © 2017 Yasuko Kageyama

The production is set by the Argentine Valentina Carrasco in Trump's times. The policemen in charge of guarding the wall are quite rough. The Lilìa Pastìa tavern is a crowded brothel in American territory. In Rushmore, under the statues of prominent US Presidents, drug trafficking flourishes. Enough to annoy a red blooded American boy, especially if conservative. But he did not bother me a bit when I saw the 2 July 2017 performance. On the contrary, I found it an intelligent way of rendering Carmen, one of the world's most performed operas, according to the statistics of Operabase.

Valentina Carrasco is an internally known stage director; for a number of years she was part of the Catalan group La Fura dels Baus. Back in Argentina, she signed a very innovative Wagner Ring at Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires. You could not expect a traditional Carmen from Carrasco and her collaborators (Samal Blak, sets, Luis Carvalho, costumes and Erika Rombaldoni and Massimiliano Volpini, choreography). As a matter of fact, Carrasco's Carmen is less shocking today than apparently the opera was at the Opéra Comique premiere in 1875. When the work toured to Vienna, the rough but effective orchestration had to be mellowed, and the spoken parts transformed into recitative with orchestral accompaniment. Of the large variety of versions of Carmen, Rome Opera's new production maintains the original but effective orchestration anticipating expressionism. However, the recitatives are those with Ernest Guiraud's music. The acting is quite good and the movement of the masses excellent.

There were problems in the pit. The orchestra rendered the colors very well and was high class in the symphonic pieces. However, the eighty-year-old conductor Jesús López-Cobos has seen better times: he seemed to lack the vigor required for Carmen, especially in the most dramatic passages, and tended to slow the tempos.

On the other hand, the protagonists were both excellent actors and singers: Veronica Simeoni was a sensual and immoral Carmen, Roberto Aronica, a passionate and jealous Don José, Alexander Vinogradov a braggart Escamillo, and Rosa Feola a very sweet Micaela. The two friends of Carmen (Daniela Cappiello and Anna Pennisi) were excellent; with them Bizet rediscovered polyphonic singing at the end of the nineteenth century.