In the goody-two-shoes role of Don Jose’s childhood sweetheart, Micaela, Barbara Frittoli offers a wiser, tougher characterization than we usually find, and the change is welcome. Still, this quality serves him well in act two’s “Flower Song,” in which he makes an attempt to croon the final lines, as Bizet intended, rather than crudely belt them as tenors usually do. She is ultimately more compelling than her Don Jose (Roberto Alagna), who has trouble summoning up the inherent danger in his character at times, he seems more like a lost little boy than someone who has already killed once and is about to kill again. Her lush lyric mezzo is a near-perfect fit for the Spanish gypsy, although she lacks real amplitude on the low end of her range. With her statuesque form and charismatic appeal, Elina Garanca rivets attention every second she is onstage. “Carmen” is a long opera - four acts - and Eyre wisely keeps things moving by granting a single intermission between acts two and three. This is a tough, nasty “Carmen,” rife with seediness and brutality. Slashes of red turn up in the scenery, the stage is often drenched in blood-red lighting, and characters seek to dominate each other with slaps, kicks, head-butts and brandished weapons. What makes Eyre’s version effective is the immediacy of his staging and the ever-present sense of violence and menace that suffuses it. This in itself is neither a new concept nor a revelatory one Frank Corsaro took the same route with the opera in the early 1980s.
Eyre takes the original 1830s setting and moves it up a hundred years to the Spanish Civil War.
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