One of the Arts Council’s many own goals last year was to reduce its grant to Glyndebourne, whose policies had been impeccably in line with the audience-friendly principles Arts Council England claims to foster. The first two productions of this year’s reduced programme have now been unveiled: a revival of the controversial Barbe & Doucet version of Die Zauberflöte ( The Magic Flute ), and a new production of Bizet’s Carmen by the American director Diane Paulus. Paulus’s conventional purpose is to present her heroine as a sexual freedom-fighter in a male-dominated world, and Ricardo Hernandez’s design for the first act hammers that message loud and clear.
The cigarette factory where she works looks like a prison, with soldiers patrolling the roof, and the entrance blocked by a cage in which the women workers are greedily appraised by the men, like fish in a restaurant tank. The strolling populace, the children larking about, and the fight among the women all bowl along convincingly, but Dmytro Popov’s entry as the troubled heartthrob Don Jose doesn’t spark as it should. His singing is sweet but underpowered, and his personality under-projected; he seems pathetically easy meat for Rihab Chaieb’s predatory Carmen.
This Tunisian-Canadian mezzo is physically aggressive and vocally mesmerising, and the burnished perfection of her sound has a lovely foil in Sofia Fomina’s delicately sung Micaela. Dmitry Cheblykov as the toreador Escamillo is more impressive by h.
