Manchester Evening News and Manchester Theatre Awards review 29 November 2015

CARMEN Opera House

ELLEN KENT’S touring opera company was back at the Opera House for two nights and offered two of the repertory ‘standards’ she has brought so often in the past. I saw Carmen (Tosca came first) and it delivered in full the audience satisfaction that is always her big selling point.

There’s one set, a hemispherical classical-style entrance to something, that does duty for every scene in both operas (a bit incongruous when we’re supposed to be in Pastia’s bar in the second act of Carmen, or out in the countryside in the third), but it helps reflect the voices into the theatre.

The company is essentially very small, but the hard-working group of chorus singers are accompanied by adult and child walk-ons from Stagecoach who manage to fill the stage quite effectively in the final scene outside the corrida, and the costumes (in that scene in particular) are colourful.

There are just eight principal voices, as Alyona Kistenyova did a series of quick-changes to represent both Micaëla (the sweetly devoted girl from tragic protagonist Don José’s village) and Frasquita (one of Carmen’s soldier-teasing, contraband-assisting, card-playing friends. She has a powerful soprano voice to top the ensembles and deserves much praise for versatility. And Irina Melnic (Mercedes) revealed a lovely voice in the Act 3 card game.

Baritone Iurie Gisca was also double-cast, as Morales the army corporal and Escamillo the toreador, and delivered both roles with vigour.

And the two leading characters, Carmen and Don José, were very well sung and (Carmen, particularly, by Liza Kadelnik) well portrayed. She is from the Romanian National Opera and made a sensuous and vocally ample gypsy temptress.

Ellen Kent’s mainly Moldovan performing resources have been augmented on this tour (as fate and politics would have it) by some experienced artists from the Ukraine – Alyona Kistenyova was with the Odessa company, which has toured here in its own right with Ellen Kent before, and tenor Vitalii Liskovetskyi, our Don José, is from the Kiev company. He was one of the best  singers of the role I’ve heard in these productions, holding his pitch well in his duet with Micaëla in Act 1, and in his Flower Song in Act 2, which are often slippery places for singers.

Valeriu Cojocaru (Zuniga) and Vladimir Dragos (Le Dancaire) did their familiar stentorian stuff.

Conductor Vasyl Vasylenko is another Ukrainian – a music director without a company at present, as he hails from Donetsk – and he made a very positive contribution, with disciplined and sometimes even lyrical playing coming from the orchestra (though what the timpanist was on bemused me at times).

When it came to the plotting quintet in Act 2, he let them rush through (as always seems to be the case with eastern European companies), but there was much to admire, the Prelude to the final act in particular.

Carmen returns to Manchester Opera House on March 19 (Buxton March 20), with Die Fledermaus on March 18.

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Robert Beale