Bizet: Carmen 'Highlights' (Callas, Prêtre)

 Georges BIZET - Carmen 'Highlights' (Callas, Prêtre)

Review (Gramophone June 1986)

"Here is a Carmen to haunt you," wrote Philip Hope-Wallace in a notice, as inimitable as Callas's own singing. No singer since Supervia has so obviously appropriated the role of Carmen on the gramophone and made it her own. Callas and her excellent supporting cast and conductor mine the opera for meaning bringing it as close to its roots in Merimee's novella as Peter Brook did in his revelatory The Tragedy of Carmen, but with Bizet's text and some of the old grand-opera accretions clinging to it (additional recitatives, etc.) which more recent recordings of Carmen have tended to strip away.

At this period of her life and career, the role of Carmen was entirely right for Callas. The result is a characterization of great force and complexity. Callas's Carmen is an exceptionally dangerous creature: dangerous in the familiar sense of physically threatening and in the much older sense of someone exuding intense sexual allure. Oddly, Callas, who in this edition has virtually nothing to speak, is no great shakes as a diseuse; yet no singer of the role in recent times better illustrates how in Carmen song is a physical and psychological necessity, dialogue and recitative turning into song which itself always retains, in Carmen's case, its kinship with the spoken word. Listen to Callas prefacing the Habanera with the words: "Peut-étre jamais, peut-etre demain;

Mais pas aujourd'hui, c'est certain" and then listen to the Habanera itself; or to the end of the Seguedille; or to the snarl in the voice at the close of the derisive "Non, tu ne m'aimes pas enivrante". As Philip Hope-Wallace noted, you don't have to drink the whole bottle to catch the flavour of this performance, one sip is enough. True, there are some murky and insecure notes here and there, and there are some coverings of tone; but the overall effect is never less than riveting; like Shakespeare's Cleopatra "the vilest things become themselves in her", even her defects have their point and charge.

Callas is splendidly supported. Pretre's conducting has plenty of animal energy, but it has elegance, too. As a reading of the score it is very French: powerful, yet as subtle and chivalrous to

Nadine Sautereau, Maria Callas and Robert Massard [photo: EMI/Sabine the sense as the bouquet of a great ChambolleMusigny. If the Escamillo, Robert Massard, is more bone-headed than fatuous, less histrionic then he should ideally be, no matter. He is very effective. Gedda is an ardent Don José. And there is a nicely soubrettish, very French, Micaela, Andrea Guiot, a good comprimario singer, unlike (say) Solti's Te Kanawa (Decca) or Karajan's Ricciarelli (DG). The recording is big and bright, with a touch of sixties' rasp, but none the worse for that and splendidly transferred to CD with all the advantages of clarity and continuity which the medium confers.

My conscientious editors have put some selected comparisons at the head of this review, a worthy aim but unavailing. When Callas is Carmen, or as PH-W more accurately put it, when Carmen becomes Callas comparisons cease to have much meaning. Her Carmen is one of those rare experiences like Piaf singing La vie en rose or Dietrich in The blue angel which is inimitable, unforgettable, and on no account to be missed.

R.O.