The summer is filling up nicely with visitors and I expect the weather to respond by being uniformly brilliant with glorious sunshine – or I shall withdraw my money from the Generalitat which, as is generally acknowledged, is entirely dependant on my largesse to keep going!

I have no wish to be alarmist but I am not going for my early morning swim because of the downpour that is hindering normal life.  It is not a convincing downpour as the sky is quite bright and the rain has petered out already – and has restarted.  It is going to be one of those days where the weather plays cat and mouse with the poor pedestrian!

Today is my first opera visit of the year to Carmen, easily one of the top five operas in terms of performance and popularity and of course (not forgetting the hapless contemporary critic who dismissed the opera for its lack of tunes) sheer hummability!

As the director of this performance in the Liceu is Calixto Bieito we can expect a controversial or at least challenging production.  From the stills that I have seen this production has his trademark electric car (in which terrible things were done in his booed version of Don Giovanni I saw in ENO) and of course it is in modern dress.  I am looking forward to it – but given the quality of our seats I will have to find my opera glasses first!

Considering that the house is fairly small it is amazing how many places something like opera glasses can be which are not where you would think they should be.  Never mind, one of the great advantages of looking for something like that is finding all the other things that you assumed were lost that you find in the search.  Hopefully.

As is usual with things that are lost “I have an idea” of where they might be.  This I think is the defining element which distinguishes the optimist from the pessimist (or realist, depending on your level of cynicism) by the way that the individual sets off on the search.  When the optimist fails to find the object in the most obvious place he does not despair but is slightly buoyed by the realization that he has eliminated one place so it must be in one of the fewer remaining places; for the pessimist if its not there it’s nowhere.

As long as one considers searches to be voyages of discovery for the purpose of revisiting old friends long thought to be irrecoverably lost then they can be rewarding.  It is only when you factor in the element of time that they become a little wearing and life denying.

On another positive note: the opera season proper does not start until the autumn, so a search for the glasses now could be looked on as a very timely action for the future!

The search has been up to this precise moment - futile.  The opera glasses are still securely located in an appropriate space that I have still not found.

So it gave me an opportunity to buy new ones in the old fashioned shop opposite Fnac in Barcelona which sells all sorts of optics. 

A lazily bored but efficient young bearded man served me and proffered two sets of opera glasses one in white with fixed focus and another, more than double the price in a more masculine colour with variable focus.  Need I go on?

Carmen!  What an opera!  Melodramatic it may well be but there is steel underneath all the posturing that the director Calixto Bieito did his best to bring out.  This is a story of sexual betrayal and the prostitution of body and soul.  There are no nice people in this story, even Micaela, a somewhat thankless role beautifully sung by Maria Bayo was portrayed a calculating woman who played the sentimental emotional blackmail card with some precision and who was not above giving Carmen a dismissively vulgar gesture of triumph when she finally managed to get Don José (indifferently sung by Fabio Armiliato) from the clutches of Béatrice Uria-Monzon’s underpowered Carmen.

When the major singers are not fully in control of their roles then the evening is not going to be a complete success.  Of the major characters only Kyle Ketelsen’s Escamillo came anywhere close to matching the power of the music with the strength of his singing and acting.

Musically the direction of Marc Pioliet of the orchestra and José Luis Basso of the chorus were excellent and they provided the true highlights of the evening.

But a Bieito production would not be acceptable without certain controversial element or elements.  Nudity we had with a young man stripping off and making a few matador gestures; cars we had – ten full sized cars on stage at one time; sex we had with various sexual activities being graphically presented on stage and so on.

Some of it was purely gratuitous but other aspects worked rather well.  I liked the presentation of the traditionally tedious brigands cave as a gathering of gypsy cars to make a contraband marketplace; the use of the chorus was always inventive and exciting, especially at it was augmented by a number of muscular young men stripped to the half to provide eye candy while the rather more prosaic looking guys did the singing!

 

One particularly effective piece of scenery was a gigantic representation of the Osborne bull which is a symbol of Spanish Spain.  When the lights went up on it there was a growl from the Catalan audience.  When in a later scene the bull was toppled the man sitting next to me clapped!

This was a lively production let down by the singing of the two major characters.  Although they grew into their roles they never, in my view filled them.  A lost opportunity.

 

Roll on next season.