All-purpose affair

The Royal Opera’s new Carmen, which opened last month, is back with different singers in all the most important roles.  The balance among the principals has changed and, rather surprisingly, though Carmen is now clearly the central figure, as she wasn’t in the first run, that hasn’t turned out to the benefit of the show overall. The Hungarian Viktoria Vizin is a considerable improvement on her predecessor, with a richer, sexier voice and persona. There is nothing much individual about her interpretation, but that goes with the general tendency of the production, an all-purpose affair with no intention of making us reconsider to the smallest degree our stereotyped views of a work which has, to adapt Adorno’s phrase, become a series of quotations of itself. That Vizin manages a pretty hot performance is a tribute to her professionalism, faced with the Don José of Marco Berti. One can only wonder at a casting policy which results in this merciless bawler being repeatedly invited back to Covent Garden, where he has been an implausible Adorno (the other one, in Simon Boccanegra), an unromantic Pinkerton, a wooden Manrico.