In Review > North America
Carmen
PITTSBURGH
Pittsburgh Opera
3/20/10
Pittsburgh Opera's Carmen (seen March 20) was at best a workaday affair, at worst shoddy and ill-conceived. The main interest was the appearance of Kate Aldrich, shortly before assuming the title role for the first time at the Met. The mezzo from Damariscotta, Maine, made a promising impression. She has many of the requisite qualities, though her Carmen is not yet fully formed.
Aldrich is a glamorous woman, perhaps a bit too aristocratic for the wanton Gypsy. She has a velvety sound, with strength in the upper octave and ability to project the lower notes without resorting to a break into chest register. She sings and acts with high intelligence, intermittently but not constantly dominating the stage in the way a true Carmen must do. She is sharp and resourceful, as shown on opening night when she took a nasty fall as she jumped off a table in Act II, then resumed her character in a split second as if nothing untoward had happened.
She was not helped by Allen Charles Klein's drab unit set or the inept staging of Eric Einhorn, who brought her onstage reading her cards during the Prelude — with dancers doing a ridiculous pantomime behind her — mitigating her entrance at the habanera and weakening the effect of her superbly vocalized card song later on. Einhorn seemed obsessed with adding sensational effects, among them dragging on a wounded Manuelita to show the result of her fight with Carmen, having the smugglers shoot Zuniga in the head at the Act II curtain and directing Don Jose to slit the heroine's throat instead of stabbing her at the end.
Through all this, Aldrich kept her eye on the mark and let her own personality invade the character. With more experience and other directors, she may one day make Carmen her own. A particular plus was her excellent French: this was the spoken dialogue version, which lent a welcome light touch to the drama. Her fellow cast members were generally less successful in emulating the Gallic accent.
In the orchestra pit, the usually dependable Antony Walker seemed to be having an off day. The playing was scrappy and harsh, and tempos were erratic — very fast in the Act I Prelude, too slow in the Act II chanson bohème, prosaic in the Act III Prelude, which Walker moved to the act's end to accommodate a scene change and avoid a third intermission.
Kelly Markgraf was a properly dashing torero, lean in sound and solid in his high notes. Roger Honeywell's Don José had ringing high notes and not much else. His vocal production was highly variable, with a different color for every two or three notes of the scale. His acting was stolid and lacking chemistry with either the heroine or Yalí-Marie Williams's Micaela — the latter indifferently vocalized and ungainly in demeanor.
The remaining principals were resident artists, all adequate, with Shannon Kessler Dooley standing out for some gleaming high notes in the big ensemble climaxes. The chorus was undernourished in size and sound. 
ROBERT CROAN
