Carmen, Glyndebourne Festival Opera review ★★★★★

In his Sunday best, Carmen's discarded lover, Don José, makes his big, last effort to win her back. Suited and booted, white shirt, smart tie, a bunch of flowers at the ready, he does all he can to impress this volatile woman. But he is no match for a toreador, totally ripped and glittering in gold and black.

Bizet's Carmen opens the 2024 season at Glyndebourne Festival Opera, which bets the house on this new production by Diane Paulus, with two runs and two casts. The Royal Opera Houses's current Carmen, Aigul Akhmetshina takes the title role from 1-24 August.

Composers, librettists and directors sometimes have to compete with real life for drama. With Ukrainian-born Dmytro Popov scheduled to sing the big tenor role of Don José, but indisposed after a single, first-night performance, in came rising artist and familiar English National Opera face John Findon, already singing small roles in this season’s revival of Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute) and propelled into this pivotal, major role.

Dmitry Cheblykov as Escamillo. Photo: Richard Hubert Smith

He makes it his own, with a voice that grows in power as the character grows in confidence, and a stage presence that unfolds from detachment and diffidence to lethal passion.

By the last act, audiences can be sick and tired of needy José. Not here. For once, your heart goes out to this man: he falls for a woman who could have any man she wants, but desires the only one who isn’t interested. This isn’t a fashionable take on Carmen, but it rings true, and so does Don Jose’s deadly frustration, as Paulus points up the violence against individual women and women en masse in our own and other societies,

In the title role Tunisian-Canadian mezzo-soprano Rihab Chaieb is physically and vocally sinuous, a woman who dares to cross the line in a palpably threatening and more or less contemporary military state. This is not obviously Bizet’s Seville, despite the toreador and bull ring, but a dead end of wire, pylons, petty crime and scuzzy bars. Dancing is more disco than flamenco.

Choreography by Jasmin Vardimon. Photo: Richard Hubert Smith

But Paulus’s meticulous direction and Glyndebourne’s imaginative chorus make real people of the presumptuous armed guards and the townsfolk who flinch from them. Simple observations – that people walk at different speeds or are in different states of mind in the same place – bring this desolate place to life.

It is refreshing to see soprano Sofia Fomina’s Michaela, a much more suitable partner for Don José, and his mother’s choice, not as a timorous ingenue but brazening it out in the practical wear of an aid worker in this troubled zone, not easily cowed.

Robin Ticciati conducts the London Philarmonic – an orchestra blessed with woodwind soloists who flourish in Bizet’s seductive, flowery melodies. And the tight ensemble singing, notably in the conspiratorial quintet, is thrilling.

Carmen (Rihab Chaieb) foresees her fate. Photo: Richard Hubert Smith

As Escamillo, hilariously muscular Dmitry Cheblykov delights with his braggadocio, but the bass-baritone who made me really sit up was Dingle Yandell as senior officer Zuniga, who is excised in an act of revenge and initiation to the criminal underworld. If you miss Carmen, you can catch him as the mystical Speaker in The Magic Flute.

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Carmen in sung in French with English surtitles. Trains to Lewes from Victoria are met by a coach to the opera house: click here for details