The south will rise again

Newcomer Southern Opera boldly nailed its colours to the mast for its maiden voyage with a canny if cautious choice: Bizet’s Carmen. Even a moderately good production of this, the “perfect opera”, can hardly fail to please given its gripping plot, great tunes and brilliant orchestration. This, however, was not a moderately good production – it was superb.

Thank God for director Elric Hooper, whose long overdue restoration to the Christchurch operatic scene promises a return to production values perversely denied recent Canterbury opera performances. Eschewing all now-customary directorial ego trips, Hooper elected to set the opera in its original 1830s period, with a sullen, hot, sun-bleached Goya-esque colour scheme. Allan Lees’ brilliantly conceived set adopted this hue, with its three tiers of arched windows, alternately opaque or transparent, serving Hooper’s cinematic treatment well. Gauzes enabled instant “cuts” to a chorus of cigarette girls, pub inmates or bullfight spectators, with equally quick “fades”, ensuring slick-paced action. The excellent chorus was musically strong, with convincing French accents, and they looked every bit as good as they sounded, their individualised characterization reminiscent of Zeffirelli. The children’s chorus was a knockout – animated, dramatically committed, with perfect timing and above all, secure part-singing and pleasing vocal tone; quite a change from the usual yelling rabble

Already hailed as a “sensational Carmen”, Rinat Shaham certainly did not disappoint. She has a remarkable voice which achieves the all-important intensity of the lower register without any detriment to a beautiful tone. Easy on the eye and a dab hand on the castanets, she embodied the feisty femme fatale. Her two leading men, Vinson Cole (Don José) and Joshua Bloom (Escamillo) were both refreshingly young and lithe. Bloom handled Escamillo with a lighter touch than usual, avoiding the gravitas and pomposity of the role’s more elderly incumbents. Cole’s immaculately-sung Don José convincingly explored the path to madness. Suzanne Prain has made the role of Micaela her own, once again showing herself uniquely capable of raising this contrived goody-goody character to a level where she can engage our sympathy. The technically demanding roles of the four smugglers were despatched with confident virtuosity, despite a less than sympathetic support from the pit at times.

On the strength of this debut production alone, one can joyfully conclude that earlier reports of the death of opera in Canterbury were greatly exaggerated. With future productions of this calibre, Southern Opera should continue to attract the support it deserves.