OPERA REVIEW : ‘Carmen’ Hits the Pavilion

The ambitious new “Carmen” staged by Nuria Espert at the Music Center Opera on Wednesday began ominously.

The curtain rose prematurely (modern directors cannot bear to have the audience listen to the orchestra) to disclose what turned out to be an all-purpose set with a pretty lady in white framed in an arch. The pretty lady turned out to be the tempestuous heroine.

Alone on the empty stage, Carmen cautiously traipsed forward to the strains of the fate motive, then doubled over. Perhaps she suffered a sudden cramp or an attack of acid indigestion. Perhaps she was flashing a preview of her not-so-imminent demise. Be that as it may, she soon disappeared, striding, after a clumsy fashion, behind a convenient pushcart propelled by a convenient strolling vendor.

This oh-so-meaningful but mysterious mime seemed to serve two purposes. It confused the audience, and it reduced Carmen’s brilliantly plotted entrance to anticlimax when the legitimate moment finally arrived.

The production--which was resoundingly panned in London when first presented in a somewhat different version last April--did not slide downward from there. But it didn’t exactly soar, either.

Apparently concentrating on character motivation, or on an unreasonable facsimile thereof, Espert spent the rest of the evening directing traffic conventionally. She spared us the intrusion of cigarette-smoking choristers clambering through the audience and over the orchestra pit en route to the Sevillian plaza--a dubious inspiration that had raised much ire at Covent Garden. And she coped as well as could be expected with Gerardo Vera’s cumbersome scenery and Franco Squarciapino’s prissy costumes.

Randall Behr--a reliable, efficient conductor who may be getting too much exposure too soon in Los Angeles--kept Bizet’s motives moving briskly (forget the somnolent aberration of the “Chanson boheme”). He seemed more interested in accommodating his singers’ disparate needs, however, than in conveying independent expressive insights.

He also minimized dynamic pathos by discarding (agreeing to discard?) the authentic spoken dialogue and reverting instead to the time-dishonored recitatives added by Ernest Guiraud after the composer’s death. There is more drama here than met the ear.

The conceptual weaknesses of this “Carmen” would have been hard to overlook under any circumstance. Still, a cast of brilliant singing-actors might have provided some welcome distraction, if not compensation. No such luck.

Carmen was entrusted to Denyce Graves, a relative novice who seems to be making a career replacing absent prima-donnas in this glamorous role. In San Francisco it was Marilyn Horne. Here it was Agnes Baltsa, whose defection months ago was attributed to an illness in the family.

Graves is, it would seem, a major talent. She is tall and slender, obviously intelligent and eminently voluptuous. She moves with confidence and subtle grace. Her eyes flash with telling insinuation. She savors textual nuance, to a reasonable degree, and she commands an attractive, smooth-timbred lyric mezzo-soprano. She might be very good in Mozart.

In an intimate house, she also might be a compelling Carmen. In a big one such as the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion (capacity 3,200), she looked a lot better than she sounded.

For all her seductive virtues, her tone remained meek and pallid on Wednesday. One missed the essential dark colors, the crucial heroic assertion, the climactic flashes of temperament. At least she didn’t force.

Placido Domingo, her celebrated Jose, was, alas, not in the best of form. He appeared ill at ease in costumes designed for the boyish Luis Lima, and the vocal line caused him discomfort much of the time too. He managed some lovely mezza-voce effects at the end of the duet with Micaela and he mustered steely urgency at the close of the third act, but he had to strain for impact in the beloved Flower Song.

Often when he should have conveyed ardor, he seemed distracted. Often when he should have suggested desperation, he just seemed tired. It was one of those nights for an overachieving tenor who, at 51, probably works too hard. (A few days ago, he gave a strenuous concert in Orange County; next week he conducts the L.A. Chamber Orchestra twice between performances of “Carmen.”)

The supporting cast proved undistinguished for the most part. Angelique Burzynski introduced a sweet if needlessly monochromatic Micaela. Michael Devlin’s histrionically dapper Escamillo teetered on the brink of vocal disaster.

Michael Gallup created a suitably puffy Zuniga, complementing Richard Bernstein’s suave Morales. In the gypsy-pipsy camp, John Atkins and Greg Fedderly underplayed the crusty wit of the smugglers while Dale Wendel-Franzen and Stephanie Vlahos confused earthy vamps with cutesy soubrettes.

The expanded Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra did what could be done under trying conditions. So did the modestly populated Master Chorale and the eager urchins of the Los Angeles Children’s Chorus. Cristina Hoyos choreographed some mildly obtrusive flamenco interpolations.

Even with the three usual intermissions mercifully reduced to two, it was a long night at the opera.