Brook’s Tragedy of Carmen flattens a great opera

By Peter Alexander

Director Peter Brook, who conceived The Tragedy of Carmen

Colorado Music Festival’s performance of The Tragedy of Carmen, Peter Brook’s radical reduction of Bizet’s opera, gave me heightened respect for the work great theater composers do, fitting their music to the demands of the stage.

Unfortunately, that is because so much of the slimmed down work fails to match music and drama as effectively as Bizet did in his original.

To be clear, that was not the fault of the performers. Under the direction of CMF music director Jean-Marie Zeitouni, and with a strong cast of singers, last night’s performance at the Chautauqua Auditorium (July 10) was delivered with emotional force and musical skill. But their commitment was not enough to overcome the limitations of the work.

Composer Georges Bizet

Zeitouni has described The Tragedy of Carmen as “the pure essence of Carmen, . . . not the regular 40% scotch but more like 97% alcohol, distilling the essence of the passion of the opera.” But for me, the CMF program notes hit closer, saying this version “is best labeled as Carmen Light. Like Bud Light (it) is less filling. But whether the new product tastes great depends on each listener’s palate.”

Fair enough. And my palate, honed by great operas including Bizet’s Carmen (and Colorado’s great craft beers), found the low-calorie version, just like light beers, lacking in taste.

There are several specific shortcomings that I found in the work itself. First, removing so much of the original takes away much of the context in which the drama is played. This has the effect of flattening the characters and their emotions.

Abigail Fischer, who portrayed the title character in CMF’s Tragedy of Carmen

A pertinent example is the scene in Lilas Pastia’s tavern. In the original, the gypsy dances that open the scene establish the kind of place it is, and provide the atmosphere for the following scene between Carmen and Don Jose. Reducing those dances to a brief flourish by Carmen not only removes the context, the setting and the atmosphere, it forces the story to lurch without respite from emotional punch to emotional punch.

A second problem is the repurposing of music that was written for a specific dramatic or stage context to another, as when the music written for a riot among the cigar girls is used for a fight between Carmen and Micaëla. Such repurposing of music discounts the skill with which the composer tailors his music for the stage. If we have a fight between two characters, it would be better to hear the music Bizet would have written for that more intimate scene, rather than what he wrote for a stage full of people.

Tenor Jason Slayden (not in Carmen)

The extreme condensation results in scenes not having time to breathe and build. In Bizet’s opening scene, there is a long buildup of tension from the moment Carmen throws a flower at Don Jose, to her arrest and her escape. Brook reduces this to a much shorter span of time, dissolving most of the suspense that Bizet so carefully builds in his score.

Brook has made some capricious changes in the plot. For one, there is a mysterious man from Carmen’s past who suddenly interrupts a love scene between Carmen and Don Jose, shouting “She belongs to me.” Only moments later he is killed by Don Jose, offstage. I still don’t know what dramatic purpose he serves. If it were not for the dark music, this would be almost comical.

The most shocking change comes near the end, when a funeral march—not from Carmen—interrupts the dramatic final scene between Carmen and Don Jose, while a projected title tells us that Escamillo has died in the bull ring. This change eviscerates the ending of the story and denies the audience a great musical-dramatic stroke, when the cheers from the bull ring punctuate Jose’s passionate appeals and murder of Carmen.

Soprano Janine De Bique

Brook’s version does remove some absurdities of plot that we have tolerated because of the dramatic truth of the opera. For example, we do not have the mountainous, secret smuggler’s lair that everyone in Seville can easily find. But we loose some of Bizet’s best music in the process, and we do not get any compensating dramatic truth, either.

While the work seems questionably conceived, the performers addressed their parts with intensity and commitment. Zeitouni led a decisive performance by the CMF Chamber Orchestra. The singers do not have named roles, only voice types, of which Abigail Fischer was a strong mezzo soprano, essentially the Carmen of the show. The abbreviated performance did not give her the chance to build a fiery, luminous character, but she dominated her scenes, as she should.

Baritone Aleksey Bogdanov

Jeanine De Bique’s soprano/Micaëla sang warmly, darkly, strongly in a role that is not made more rewarding by Brook’s changes. Baritone Aleksey Bogdanov had the unenviable task of playing two different characters who die before the end, Zuniga and Escamillo. I thought he was especially effective in one of opera’s great star turns, his entrance as the toreador. Tenor Jason Slayden was vocally passionate, if a little stiff dramatically in his scenes as Don Jose.

Chautauqua Auditorium may not be a great venue for theater. Many of the spoken lines were scarcely audible, particularly when the orchestra was playing. The limited performance space left the actors to move almost randomly, with no setting to indicate destination or motivation, and I found their movements around and behind the conductor to be distracting.

I suspect this show is best for people who do not know the original Carmen well and want a distilled taste of the story. Clearly, many in the audience enjoyed it. I cannot begrudge them any pleasure taken from the music and the performance, but you will more likely find me at a future production of Bizet’s full opera—or enjoying a strong local brew.

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EDITORIAL NOTE (7/11/16): The CMF program notes for The Tragedy of Carmen do not credit an author. However, it has come to my attention that the portion that I quoted above—Brook’s version “is best labeled as Carmen Light. Like Bud Light (it) is less filling. But whether the new product tastes great depends on each listener’s palate.”—appeared in an Oct. 13, 2013 review by David Abrams of a performance of The Tragedy of Carmen at Syracuse Opera, published online at Opera Today.

Wrapping up two nights of full, burnished orchestral sounds at Chautauqua

By Peter Alexander

Four symphonies in two days is a lot of Brahms, but Jean-Marie Zeitouni and the Colorado Music Festival Orchestra pulled it off to the full satisfaction of their audience. Last night’s (July 8) nearly-full house for the second of two concerts stood and cheered and whistled and—was that a horse whinny I heard behind me?

It’s safe to say the audience showed its robust approval.

The second program was shared by the Third Symphony in F major and the 4th Symphony in E minor—two works that, Zeitouni said, “speak to someplace where mortals are not even invited.” Happily, he did invite his mortal audience into the elevated—if not quite otherworldly—performance.

The orchestra filled the Chautauqua Auditorium with the rich tones and well balanced chords of the brass section from the very first notes of the Third Symphony. Their bright, burnished sounds characterized both evenings’ performances, and they particularly suited this work.

The first movement, with its complex textures and overlapping lines, is particularly challenging for conductors and players alike. To their credit, the CMF orchestra played with great transparency, making every inner line in the woodwinds, every passing theme audible.

The shifting chords at the recapitulation—a particular hazard of the movement—were all carefully balanced and matched. In many ways, the performance of this movement was exemplary: Zeitouni and the Festival Orchestra at their very best.

Both the second and third movements gave the players a chance to revel in a relaxed fullness of sound. These movements are perhaps too much the same, but both were played with great delicacy of phrasing and beauty of sound. The Horn solo in the third was especially memorable.

The many thematic fragments of the finale were successfully pulled together and wrapped in a full and cushioning orchestral fabric. Zeitouni’s characteristic transparency of texture made it all work. Once again, the horn playing was beautiful, if slightly overbalancing the rest of the orchestra. The end subsided, as it is written, into a vanishing whisper that became another of the challenges of this symphony successfully overcome.

Jean-Marie Zeitouni

The Fourth Symphony is one of my favorite pieces, even if I don’t quite share Zeitouni’s belief that it is “the most beautiful and profound music ever written for orchestra.” Nonetheless, it is unmistakably beautiful and profound and always welcome on an orchestral program.

The first movement provides a great example of tradeoffs in interpretive decisions. Zeitouni sought out different sound qualities in the different layers of the orchestral texture, with the strings ranging from brilliant to a warm, sustained and singing sound, punctuated by raspy, pecking chords from the woodwinds, and the brass always chorale-like in their warmth and resonance. This brings out the separate lines and ideas, but the tradeoff is a loss of unity and blend.

This was a soaring, lyrical reading of the first movement, not tortured or dramatized as it is sometimes heard. All the layers and sections came together for a surging climax that could have—but didn’t quite—upstage the final close of the symphony.

Sometimes you have to just sit back and enjoy the sound of an orchestra. That was largely the case in the second movement, even when the horns seemed again just more than was needed in contrast to the hushed pianissimos.

The third movement was played in a very direct and straightforward style. Sometimes played with a halting quality, as if there were a gravitational pull holding back the momentum, here it was brisk and bracing, an approach that is in alignment with the rest of Zeitouni’s interpretation.

A set of variations on a simple chord progression, the finale is a throwback to the German Baroque music that Brahms studied and loved. It is certainly one of the great orchestral movements, with the Baroque and Classical and Romantic techniques all coming together in a kind of ideal synthesis that seems to transcend time and styles. This movement does occupy another plane.

The trick is to recognize the joints between the many individual variations, but to get through them without a loss of tension and forward movement. The slower, softer middle variations seemed to relax a little too much, particularly as a beautiful brass chorale died into silence. But—another tradeoff?—the impact was stunning when the full wind section proclaimed the return of the original chords, allegro, forte, fortissimo, kicking the whole thing into an extra gear. You will not hear a more effective ending of Brahms’s Fourth.

Zeitouni has said this is the first of many single-composer mini-festivals to come at CMF. That is the kind of programming that raises the festival above the ordinary, providing both musical pleasure and illumination for Boulder’s audiences. I applaud Zeitouni and the CMF for this commitment and look forward to future installments.