A Fresh, Engaging Take on ‘Carmen’ at the Kennedy Center

The performance arts world—specifically but not exclusively the world of classical music and opera—has been debating the issue of appealing to younger audiences while trying to hang on to its dwindling traditional core audience for quite some time now.

There’s always a critical clamor for new works and new ways of presenting traditional material, but the Washington National Opera, no slouch in that department this season, opened its 2015-2016 with a decidedly familiar and traditional piece, Bizet’s “Carmen,” which, along with such other popular stalwarts as “Madame Butterfly” and “La Boheme,” are often described as operas for people who hate operas.

But there may be a solution that lies in this grand, crowd-pleasing and emotionally affecting production: the notion that you can have your opera cake and eat it, too. The answer may lie in presenting a familiar work like “Carmen” and do it with an eye toward uniform excellence in such a way that the production elicits the opera’s considerable musical and dramatic virtues. If your production is full of almost uniformly outstanding musical qualities from the star turns to the chorus and orchestra, maybe there’s no need to take a radical approach to make things “revelant,” an approach that has sometimes soured a few productions elsewhere.

This production is remarkably brisk, moving swiftly through a three-hour, one-intermission evening in an engaging way. It’s intense and passionate when it needs to be. It creates a world that seems lived in both musically and emotionally by its characters. It makes you listen and respond.

For the long-standing opera audience, it delivers the expected pleasures and desired results. But here’s another notion: newer audiences, and there were quite a few younger folks in the audience who seemed to appreciate the proceedings, are seeing and listening to something with new eyes and ears, and to many of the them, this is surely a lot fresher material than an Elvis impersonator.

This, then, was a production that was engineered to please operas buffs and newcomers alike. It had a certain freshness to it that went with the rewards of a familiar plot and familiar music. Director E. Loren Meeker didn’t tweak the proceedings too much. It’s a production that has been staged in other places—but added a spicy as well as somewhat stately flamenco sheen to the night, and updated the setting to what could have been Peronist Argentina or Franco’s Spain, what with the notable military presence.

Evan Rogister conducted a score notable for being melodic and, well, operatic, with elan and flair, and it’s the music that tells the tale here. Although there were sequences that featured spoken dialogue the way Bizet had originally done back in its Paris Opera Comique debut in 1875, to considerable critical controversy, some critics even claiming that it had too many Wagnerian qualities.

That’s hardly true—what it has is a kind of French verve (it’s sung in French) on top of a decidedly Spanish look, and feel, and even sound, with some of the music arising from traditional Spanish folk music. It’s an opera that’s beautiful to listen to, almost all the way through. You could shut your eyes and still be moved and carried away by the drama and music.

This “Carmen” also had, on opening night, a fine “Carmen,” which is absolutely necessary, in the French Mezzo-Soprano Clementine Margaine, who’s had considerable acclaim with the role, and makes for a vivid Gypsy femme fatale. That’s probably where the expression came from: her strutting stances, her disdainful attitude and a stone-strong confidence in her allure, and the ultimate effect of it. This Carmen is big trouble for any man with a heart beat, especially in her “Habanera” and when she sings about her considerable charms and the inevitability of the disasters of love, and her passionate need for freedom.

The honorable naïf that is Don Jose, a sergeant in the billeted military unit in a small village never stands a chance, in spite of his engagement to a local village girl Micaela (sung sweetly by Janai Brueger), and his love for his sainted and dying mother. Soon enough, he’s under the sway of Carmen, who loves him passionately in her fickle fashion. Soon enough, he’s in deep with her brigand gypsy pals, and soon enough, she leaves him for the more sophisticated but equally smitten matador. On opening night, American tenor Bryan Hamel as Don Jose was the musical and dramatic essence of anguish, especially in the climatic scene when he struggles to win back a defiant Carmen even as he hears the cheers of the “Toreador Song” coming from the arena.

All of this is flavored in rich atmospherics, and the strong presence of young singers in the formations of villagers, soldiers and bandits, it makes for a rich, colorful evening, the kind of night were you can become immersed in a vividly created world of music and drama on stage.

(Morgaine shares the role of Carmen with another French Mezzo Soprano Geraldine Chauvet, as does Hamel share his Jose with American tenor Michael Brandenburg. “Carmen” will be performed at the Kennedy Center Opera House through October 2.)