Margaine was often barely audible in her lower range, where she seemed to be fiddling with off-the-voice diseuse colorations. Higher up, she produced great gusts of tone, sometimes well-centered and sometimes not. The overall impression was too unbalanced to be very effective. Stocky of figure and not possessed of undulant moves, she was robbed of any potential glamour by miserable down-market costuming. Escamillo, here presented as a rodeo star who happens to be driving by (lots of mysteriously steered automotive vehicles in this show) was sung by Ryan Speedo Green. He’d been vocally solid in a secondary part in Fire Shut Up in My Bones, and had taken over the lead in that opera’s revival earlier this season. He sang the Toreador Song (a funny signature tune for a rodeo rider) choppily, with no sustained guidance of the descending phrases, and with the detached syllables often bearing little resemblance to fragments of French. Like many a baritone or bass-baritone, he did not find the lie of the song comfortable, with nearly vanishing B-flats at the bottom and dully covered Fs at the top. The subsidiary characters had little chance to make an impression, though my favorite misfit of text to action belonged to Zuniga as he came on the scene in Act 2. Making his way from right to left, downstage of the tractor-trailer truck converted to party venue but upstage of the gasoline pumps atop which Carmen and José have been lying to negotiate their relationship (do not inquire), he dutifully sang “J’ouvre moi-même et j’entre.”

Under Matheuz, a Venezuelan who has compiled some high-level credits, the orchestra made a similar impression to that I described  under Zhiang for Butterfly (above), with an added predilection for tempo extremes—a fevered prestissimo for the opening section of the Prelude, a slack-sounding Largo for the start of the Chanson Bohème. And I wonder if either he or Daniele Rustioni, who conducted the earlier series of performances, was consulted in the matter of a performing edition. A scan of the fine print in the program reveals that it is “in part” the critical edition supervised by Fritz Oeser. The many corruptions of this edition had been thoroughly exposed by Winton Dean even before the Met decided to use it anyway, in much larger part, in the season of 1972-73. ^(I) In the two acts of the present production I saw, I recognized nothing from Oeser, save cuts in the Guiraud recitatives to which the company has reverted. There was no extended string quartet for the changing of the guard, no mélodrame for Moralès, no expanded versions of the Fumée chorus or the factory girls’ fight. And there’s no pretense of incorporating even the informationally crucial parts of the dialogue. So, with the caveat that amazing things may have been revealed in Acts 3 and 4, I don’t know what it can mean to be using, “in part, the critical edition of Fritz Oeser,” and I can only conclude that there is no curation going forward at the Met for this cornerstone repertory opera from season to season, or even production to production.