Bizet: Carmen – review

This was recorded last year at the Opéra-Comique in Paris, where Carmen had its premiere in 1875. It in no way attempts historical reconstruction, but aims for a sense of the original scale and scope of a piece that has been performed as everything from the most intimate of chamber works to an epic, with a cast of thousands. John Eliot Gardiner conducts Richard Langham Smith's new critical edition with fiery precision, while the period sound of the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique adds rawness to the prevailing sensuality. Adrian Noble's production, hampered by its vortex-cum-bullring set, doesn't ideally anchor the work in the French naturalist tradition, but Anna Caterina Antonacci and Andrew Richards generate such a terrific erotic charge as Carmen and José that you understand why its first audiences found it obscene. Anne-Catherine Gillet's Micaela is timorous rather than morally strong, which might have been preferable here. The drawback is Nicolas Cavallier's Escamillo, dully sung and unattractive: you're left wondering what Carmen sees in him.