You’d be hard pressed to find a fierier season closer than Carmen, Bizet’s still wildly popular homage to opera’s favourite quintessentially feisty femme fatale and all-around “bad girl.”
Manitoba Opera (MO) capped its 51st season with the French composer’s opera comique based on a libretto by Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy, still dazzling audiences around the globe since its 1875 premiere at Paris’s Opéra Comique, and notably MO’s first production of the classic since April 2010.
Originally slated for 2020, the company abruptly cancelled the prior production mid- rehearsals owing to COVID closures. Several of the artists performing during its latest production were set to appear four years ago, helping bring a sense of closure – not to mention surreal time warp – to that unparalleled time in which so many shows were unceremoniously scrapped.
The spring offering, performed in French (with English surtitles), originally designed for Edmonton Opera and stage directed by Brian Deedrick, however, proved well worth the wait, featuring a galaxy of Canada’s finest opera stars, including several principals proud to call the Prairie city home.
Notably, the company dedicated its entire three-performance run, held April 13, 17 and 19, to the memory of much beloved Winnipeg-born artist and Royal Swedish Opera artistic director Michael Cavanagh, whose untimely death on March 13th sent shockwaves around the world. Cavanagh first cut his opera teeth under MO’s former legendary artistic director (1977-98) Irving Guttman, continuing to sing praises for the troupe wherever his stellar international career took him.
Photo Credit: R.Tinker Carmen Manitoba Opera, Ginger Costa-Jackson (Carmen)
Italian-born American mezzo-soprano Ginger Costa-Jackson, marking an auspicious MO debut in the title role, smouldered like embers in a bonfire, her smoky vocals creating a flesh-and-blood heroine dead set on controlling her own destiny. The charismatic Metropolitan Opera star’s volatile, highly visceral portrayal in which she knocked over chairs, struck at her lovers, or belted out iconic arias – including the famous Habanera “L’amour est un oiseau rebelle” and her sizzling sizzling Seguidilla “Près des remparts de Séville”– enthralled. At times, her dramatic intensity, just a hair’s breadth from rage as opposed to passion, proved too much of a good thing, but her final display of greater vulnerability in Acts III and IV, as Carmen realizes her ultimate fate while torn between lovers, allowed us to feel greater empathy for this ill-fated wildcat.
The always-wonderful Canadian lyric tenor David Pomeroy – who has astonishingly performed Don José for 20 years including in Winnipeg in 2010 – embarked on his own emotional trajectory that takes him from dutiful corporal to obsessive lover prepared to kill for his desires. His “big aria,” a.k.a the “Flower Song,” (“La fleur que tu m’avais jetée) did not disappoint, with the compelling singer’s lyrical phrasing, pleasing vibrato and resonant voice that soared into his uppermost register enough to send anyone into a swoon.
It’s been far too long since we’ve seen Canadian bass-baritone Daniel Okulitch grace this stage. He last enthralled MO audiences in his title role in Mozart’s Don Giovanni in 2018. Okulitch’s larger-than-life presence as macho bullfighter Escamillo oozed with sexy swagger, his booming vocals first heard in Act II’s famous “Toreador Song.”
Winnipeg-based soprano Lara Ciekiewicz created a pitch-perfect Micaëla, Don José’s long-suffering “country girl” hoping to marry her soldier, who serves as counterpoint to the seductive charms of Carmen. The singing actress brought an entire rainbow of emotional colours to her carefully nuanced role, with her shimmering, impeccably controlled vocals showcased during “Je dis que rien,” sung with heartrending sentiment as she discovers José hiding in the mountains with Carmen and her band of smugglers.
Other principal roles included baritone Johnathon Kirby in his dual characters Morales/Le Dancaïre and bass-baritone Giles Tomkins as Zuniga, who barks out orders to José. Carmen’s faithful confidantes were played by lyric coloratura soprano Lara Secord-Haid (Frasquita) and mezzo-soprano Barbara King (Mercédès), whose voices melded together as one during Act II’s quintet “Nous avons en tête une affaire!” in which they were joined by Carmen as well as the smugglers, Le Dancaïre and Le Remendado (tenor Jacques Arsenault). Secord-Haid and King also delivered an ominous “Mêlons! Coupons!,” in which Carmen’s fate is ultimately revealed through their tarot cards.
Photo Credit: R.Tinker Carmen Manitoba Opera
The combination of Deedrick’s keen attention to detail and ability to maintain a greater, overall vision made this opera, now set in 1930s Seville, sing. Some highly effective stage activity took place behind a scrim, with falling rose petals suggesting streaming blood from a bull – or heroine. Other touches of stage business were also highly effective, such as Carmen biting into an orange, before she hurled pieces of fruit at the soldiers, and the entrance of the chorus of cigarette factory girls emerging in a puff of smoke was pure magic.
MO principal conductor Tyrone Paterson skilfully led the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra through Bizet’s flashy score, its iconic themes as razor sharp as a picador’s lance.
The production featured effective lighting design by Hugh Conacher, Spanish-flavoured choreography by Brenda Gorlick, and fight direction by Jacqueline Loewen. The multi- tiered sets designed by Camellia Koo created the cigarette factory, tavern, smugglers’ den, and bull-ring in which the well-prepared Manitoba Opera Chorus (Tadeusz Biernacki, chorus director) and a particularly zesty Children’s Chorus (Carolyn Boyes, chorus master) perched to cheer Escamillo’s killing of the bull as Carmen lays dying outside.
As expected, opening night’s capacity audience leapt to its feet at the end, with Carmen’s own rallying cry, “Free she was born, free she will die” still ringing in the air like a clarion call.
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Holly Harris has served as an opera, classical music, dance and theatre critic for over 20 years, including having written for Opera Canada since 2009. A Prairie girl at heart, her reviews and articles have also appeared in the Winnipeg Free Press, Ludwig van Toronto, Musicworks, Opera Today, Classical Voice North America, Dance International, The Dance Current, Symphony, and The Strad.
