Larmore Eases Into ‘Carmen’

Carmen. Forget the music for a minute, and just think about who the character is and what she represents. She is one of the great figures in drama, a great icon of the modern world and a great woman around whom we love to spin fantasies and theories.

Men love, and always have loved, Carmen, because she is so seductive and so true to herself. And women, right up to today’s new generation of feminist musicologists, love her for exactly the same reason.

But forget the music at great risk: It gives Carmen her soul. I know that’s trite, but it happens to be true. The music also happens to be one of opera’s more gracefully conceived scores, and one brilliant in its use of the orchestra. But, however many times “Carmen” has been recorded, and however cherished some of those recordings may be (including Maria Callas’ great portrayal, which was only for the microphone--she never sang it onstage), “Carmen,” of all operas, is about character and theater.

The Hollywood Bowl, however, tried to convince us otherwise Sunday night. Not just in the fact that it presented “Carmen” in concert form. There is a perfectly honorable tradition of concert opera, and especially at the Bowl. Management never tires of reminding us, and understandably so, of the days a quarter-century ago when the likes of Jessye Norman, Luciano Pavarotti and James Levine performed opera at the Bowl before they were the superstars they are today.

Jennifer Larmore was Sunday’s Carmen, and it is altogether possible that those in attendance will one day proudly bore younger opera fans with the fact that they heard her first Carmen. But we can’t be sure.

There is no question as to Larmore’s ability to sing the role. Her voice, a mezzo-soprano, is perfect for the role, with all the qualities we attribute to a heady wine--rich, deep, strong, colorful, flexible and complex. And Larmore has been trying hard lately to convince us that she is a Carmen. She sings excerpts from the opera in her recitals. And last year her recording of the opera, an oddball but not uninteresting one conducted by Giuseppe Sinopoli, was released.

But the fact is she has never sung the role onstage. Sunday was her first run through the complete opera in public, and she sang it wonderfully. But she is still score-bound. She rose, for each number, stood at a music stand, occasionally flipping an arm back in drama, occasionally flipping it forward to turn the page of music, and then sat down again, waiting for her next turn. The voice, alone, alluded to temperament and exoticism, but just.

This is the danger of concert opera. It can be a useful way to give obscure operas a hearing; it can be an illuminating way to hear musical details in the most sophisticated works; and it can even be a lively semi-staged dramatic occasion, with the help of a good director.

Sunday’s performance was none of the above. John Mauceri conducted a nearly complete version of the opera with plenty of useful direct propulsion, and the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra played with enough security to make a good a pit band. The new, improved amplification system made the music a pleasure to hear. But the concert format was painfully stiff.

The cast came from everywhere, each singer with a different style, accent and dramatic concept of his or her role, and little was done to make it seem otherwise. There was no attempt at interaction between characters. Don Jose and Carmen might sing a duet on separate sides of the wide Bowl stage. Entrances had the look of uncertainty about them. And at one point, Inessa Galante, who sang Micaela, broke the sliver of dramatic spell by clumsily moving a couple of other singers out of their seats, so that she could have hers.

Galante, from Riga, Latvia, and newly discovered, was the other singer who came with hype. Her manner is grand to the point of extravagance. Her vibrato is wide, she gets one word in 10 out clearly and she seemed eager to make the meek character in the opera the star.

The rest of the cast included Gabriel Sade as a stentorian Don Jose; Franck Ferrari as a sturdy Escamillo. John Relyea and David Okerlund were reliable as Zuniga and Morales, but also seemed, like everyone else, a bit lost under the big Bowl shell without a director. The Los Angeles Master Chorale had its glory the previous night in Beethoven’s Ninth.