Opera Scotland

Carmen 2005Chisinau National Opera, Moldova

Read more about the opera Carmen

This autumn tour by Ellen Kent's long-term colleagues from Chisinau, the capital of Moldova, consisted of the ever-popular Carmen in rep with a rarity in Scotland, at least professionally. Nabucco has never been presented by either Scottish Opera or the Edinburgh Festival, nor by Carl Rosa or Sadler's Wells in 'olden days'.

This tour went to 38 venues between 8 September and 7 December. 57 performances were given of Carmen and only 22 of Nabucco. It might appear that Scotland did rather well, with 13 performances (including four of Nabucco), when Northern Ireland received only two and Wales just one. However this was the infamous period when Scottish Opera nearly disappeared altogether, and was forced to stop mainstage productions for a year.

Carmen, it must be said, is a work that the company seems less at ease with than the Italian standards they perform. It is the only French piece they bring, and they seem to find the language more difficult to project. In those circumstances the use of Guiraud's recits is probably inevitable (easier than dialogue), but they do slow the drama. Also, the performance seems to suffer from any unevenness in casting on the tour. While everyone was putting in plenty of effort on 13 November, the drama rather hung fire. The best performance by far came from the lovely Irina Vinogradova as Micaëla - a performance of real class with which the others couldn't really compete.

Cast details from souvenir brochure, with amendments from inserted cast list.