Carmen review – opera at its most dramatic

Bizet’s quintessentially Gallic masterpiece is sometimes viewed as a precursor of the realist movement in Italian opera, and in this full-blooded revival of David McVicar’s 2002 production, carefully restaged by Marie Lambert, it is the detailed veracity of both characterisation and action that underlies a remarkable demonstration of opera at its most dramatic.

From the gritty urban milieu of the opening scene outside Seville’s cigarette factory to the spectacularly colourful procession of the bullfighters in the fourth act, Michael Vale’s sets and Sue Blane’s costumes provide a visual framework in which the individual performances are able to operate with total credibility; only the showbizzy choreography – which looks as if it has been bussed in from a musical – lets the side down.

The main performances all have a good deal to offer. At the epicentre, Stéphanie d’Oustrac’s Carmen combines dignity, intelligence and knowing sexual allure; vocally, she paces her interpretation skilfully, leaving plenty in reserve for the tragic finale, where she and Czech tenor Pavel Černoch, as Don José , strike sparks off each other in their fatal battle of wills. Černoch portrays the soldier as a rigidly awkward mother’s boy who cannot deal with Carmen’s rejection; his singing appropriately combines refinement with extreme volatility.

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David Soar finds all the notes for the wide range required of toreador Escamillo, and exudes macho self-confidence. Lucy Crowe suggests Micaëla’s determination as well as her relative conventionality, her fine-grained lyric soprano forming an effective counterweight to d’Oustrac’s duskier mezzo. Secondary roles are also vividly sketched, from Simon Lim’s oafish Zuniga to the two double acts: Eliana Pretorian and Rihab Chaieb as Carmen’s cronies, and the smugglers Christophe Gay and Loïc Félix. In the pit, Jakub Hrůša conducts an alert London Philharmonic in a taut but impassioned account.