Bizet - Carmen, at La Monnaie in Brussels

La Monnaie, Brussels, Sunday June 15 2025

Conductor: Nathalie Stutzmann. Production, sets and dialogues: Dmitri Tcherniakov. Costumes: Elena Zaitseva. Lighting: Gleb Filshtinsky. Carmen: Stéphanie d’Oustrac. Don José: Attilio Glaser. Micaëla: Anne-Catherine Gillet. Escamillo: Edwin Crossley-Mercer. Zuniga: Christian Helmer. Moralès: Pierre Doyen. Frasquita: Louise Foor. Mercédès: Claire Péron. Le Dancaïre: Guillaume Andrieux. Le Remendado: Enguerrand De Hys. L’administrateur: Pierre Grammont. La Monnaie Orchestra, Chorus, Youth and Children’s Choirs.

Photos: © Bernd Uhlig

La Monnaie’s new Carmen was originally staged in Aix in 2017. Like thousands of others, I saw it on video afterwards, and though I was impressed by Michael Fabiano’s fervent commitment to Dmitri Tcherniakov’s production concept, otherwise didn’t enjoy it much. I was bored by the unchanging set, and, though I’d found it intriguing when it was a novelty in 2012, a bit fed up, thirteen years and several productions on, with the director’s fixation with group therapy. I was glad to have a chance to see the production in the house this season and perhaps, in a different mood and different circumstances, change my mind, even if Fabiano sadly wasn’t scheduled to sing at my Sunday matinee.

For those who may not already have seen or read about it, Tcherniakov’s Carmen apparently uses Bizet’s complete score, including passages traditionally cut, without Ernest Guiraud’s recitatives but with completely new spoken dialogues written, unless I’m mistaken, by the director himself. The musical numbers are performed within a framing concept sustained by these brief new texts. If I understood the copious programme notes, the director felt that to revitalise the myth of Carmen for today’s ‘emotionally blasé’ audience, ‘filled with despair and irony fed by their bitter experiences on every side,’ it has to be stripped of what, through familiarity, have come to be ‘insipid clichés and tourist curiosities.’ Here is the framework he thus concocted (translated from the programme):

‘A man suffering from depression, affecting his libido, is taken by his wife to an establishment where patients’ desires are re-awakened by role-playing works such as Carmen. The acting out, by the therapist playing the title role, of erotic or impassioned situations in the opera is intended to stimulate the newcomer’s faltering virility.’

As you can see, this gives rise to a striking mise en abyme: to revitalise the myth of Carmen for us all, the director stages the revitalisation of the role-player’s desires through the re-enactment of that very myth. Not unexpectedly, it ends badly, for ‘José’ at least.

The role-play takes place, from start to finish, in the atrium of a soulless 80s chain hotel of the Crowne Plaza kind (or is it a clinic?): metal-framed glass doors topped with green exit signs, beige marble everywhere, geometrically-patterned flooring, boxy beige pillars, boxy brown-leather sofas and armchairs, cheap, square coffee tables, two little security cameras peering down, a water cooler at the rear, an elaborate but charmless ensemble of cut-glass ceiling lights, and ruched net curtains at the upper-storey windows.

‘José’ is led in by his wife and given instructions and a name-tag by the ‘administrateur’, a facilitator played by an actor. Reluctant and mocking at first, by the start of the third act he’s insisting on taking the experiment further. As, by the end, he’s attempted a sexual assault on Carmen-the-therapist, before stabbing her with a spring-loaded navaja supplied by assistants, it’s declared a success. And while champagne and bouquets are brought in to celebrate, José-the-husband, no longer able to distinguish between role and reality, cowers in a huddle on the floor, caressed by his wife, Micaëla.

The directing is a masterpiece of its kind. The acting, whether comic, as it often is - the men, for example gleefully act out the children’s marches while the kids sing offstage - or tragic, is impeccably managed, to startlingly convincing effect. Tcherniakov demonstrates once more what an outstanding director he is; you goggle at his skill in coaxing such outstanding dramatic performances out of his soloists and chorus-members. But if you don’t share his fascination with group therapy, while the result is certainly ingenious - ‘technically’ fascinating - it may not actually achieve his goal of ‘revitalising’ the opera’s ‘myth’, at least not for everyone present. 

Supporting roles were well cast. Both Christian Helmer and Pierre Doyen were firm and mellifluous as Zuniga and Moralès respectively, and Enguerrand De Hys was even a bit of a luxury as Le Remendado. Claire Péron’s youthful Mercédès was eclipsed somewhat by Louise Foor’s gleaming Frasquita, whose top notes soared very satisfactorily over the ensembles.

Playing Escamillo, Edwin Crossley-Mercer swaggered about in his white suit and red bow-tie (incongruously bringing KFC’s Colonel Sanders to mind) with his usual, handsome charm. His singing is still upright and forthright and nicely phrased, but the sound of his voice, and even now his diction, seem to be turning woolly, dampening his vocal impact, something I noticed earlier this season when he sang Créon in Médée at the Opéra Comique.

Anne-Catherine Gillet is a seasoned Micaëla; it was one of the first roles I saw her in, in 2009, when the fabulous Anna Caterina Antonacci sang Carmen under Gardiner, and a different Fabiano, Fabiano Cordeiro, stepped in so near the very last minute that I didn’t even catch his name, and had to find it out later. (When even experienced singers are scared of working for Gardiner, imagine stepping in out of nowhere!) Gillet’s voice is still as silvery and has kept its quick vibrato - ‘silvery, tremulous’ I wrote 16 years ago, ‘with a lot more volume than, from her timbre, you’d expect.’ Her voice now has a pleasantly old-fashioned ‘soubrette’ sort of sound, and she played the spiky, bourgeois wife, in a neat, pink coat with a dinky handbag, pearls, and her hair rolled up in a french pleat, well.

In a production of this kind, the dramatic urgency of the acting means you’re less focused on the singing alone. This was in Attilio Glaser’s favour as her Don José husband. I wasn’t alone, as I found when chatting with friends at the interval, in being worried about the future of his voice - or voices, as he seemed to have several - if he carries on as we heard him on Sunday. Singing softly, in the middle range, he’s fine, but his top, whether head or chest, sounds painfully uncomfortable: hard, precarious, sometimes sharp. I’m not a professional, of course, just an amateur who’s been to a lot of operas, so I’m really talking (or in this case, writing) out of the top of my head. But two thoughts came to my mind as I sat there: one was that he perhaps needs to call in help to manage his evidently powerful instrument more soundly; the other was that he may have been pointed, when younger (I don’t know how old he is, but see he debuted as Werther in Klagenfurt in 2019) towards the wrong fach. Mightn’t he be a baritone?

Presumptuous of me. But I’ve learnt that, as we get older, experience may turn to instinct, giving us hunches that turn out to be right. His commitment to the production concept was as complete as Fabiano’s on video, and his burly frame (in a blue suit and tan shoes) made him quite frightening when roused, so as I implied above, his acting compensated for what sounded like vocal waywardness, but we were all quite worried for the future of the young man’s voice and career.

Like many singers first heard in ‘HIP’ performances of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century roles, Stéphanie d’Oustrac (whom I first met in José Montalvo’s kaleidoscopic production of Rameau’s Les Paladins, so long ago that it predates my blog) has progressed into what might be thought of as heavier roles over more recent years. With Carmen, she’s at her limit, certainly, and at times her singing is forced, especially in the chest. But her top is sounder and more ringing than ever and, as she’s followed this production from its debut in Aix, her acting - whether arch and playful or fiercely dramatic - is phenomenally ‘true’. Again, dramatic urgency, force of conviction, compensate fully for occasional vocal shortfalls.

In the pit, under Nathalie Stutzmann, La Monnaie’s orchestra was in peak form. Carmen has the kind of score that suited them well even before Altinoglu took them to unsuspected heights in Parsifal and the Ring. Their playing was firm and warm but still clear and detailed, colourfully highlighting Bizet’s brilliant orchestration and melodic invention. The programme notes asserted proudly that both orchestra and chorus, performing Bizet’s score without cuts (albeit with brand-new dialogues) were just the size of those present at the Opéra Comique in Bizet's day. They forgot, though, that in Bizet’s day, the instruments would have had a softer sound; on Sunday, given some of the casting choices, the volume from the pit was perhaps a smidgin more than needed, but the playing was (to resort to an old-fashioned cliché: I’ve been reading Shaw) undeniably rousing.

The chorus was also in fine fettle, the one tiny caveat being that, though Nathalie Stutzmann was firmly in charge, Tcherniakov’s detailed directing sometimes gave each of them them so much to do, scuttling around the stage and over the sofas, that it was hard for the conductor to keep everything tightly in synch.

But also, a performance I can't help thinking of any time I see Carmen:

Note: an edited version of this post may be published on Parterre.com.