<<  -- 6 --  Roderic Dunnett    MIXED RESULTS

Success or failure, however, hinges on the principal pair, Carmen and Don José. Lavric is a class performer, and an understater too. None of the big arias was played up for kicks -- though one might think that was Carmen's style; each was delivered with style, subtlety, a power of innuendo, plus movements and gestures to match. From the well-judged first entry, here was a Carmen with class, intellectually a cut above the rest, as capable of holding her onstage audience (if not always the auditorium one) with an almost confidential, mezzo-forte 'tra-la' in the factory scene as of seducing José (she all but does!) during her bewitching aria of Act II. We see how she plays on José; how his capture almost instantaneously wearies her; why she moves on to Escamillo; and why all this carries the seeds of her destruction, as surely as it does for Berg's Lulu (the kind of opera Chisinau ought to be staging back home).

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