Carmen, Deutsche Oper Berlin, 13 April 2011

Charlottenburg is a fairly charmless shopping area southwest of the Tiergarten. When we got off the train I looked around and realised, ‘We’re not going to get a decent cup of coffee around here.’ The Deutsche Oper is a fairly charmless building in the postwar ‘what the hell are people?’ style so prevalent in Berlin. The foyers are vast, soulless spaces divided by glass and extensive cloakroom facilities. And the auditorium has teak panelling.

I picked up our tickets from the box office and froze. They were the right tickets; the only problem was the magic word Familientag on it. Tonight’s show was a family performance. They didn’t mention that when I bought the tickets on the website. You know what a family performance means? It means a house full of school kids, restless noises and laughter at unexpected times. It also means a second string cast.

When I received the cast list my heart sank. The two leads were both ‘ill’ (of course they’d be ill, it’s a familientag, full of people who don’t know their operatic arse from their elbow).

I should be clear, I was not apprehensive because the leads had been replaced – that happens all the time, and you hear some fantastic performances unexpectedly. It was the name beside Carmen: Anita Rachvelishvili.

I thought she’d been booted out of opera and started another career in a completely different field, like McDonald’s.

Let me explain. The season at the Teatro alla Scala in Milan opens the same day every year, December 7. It is a huge occasion: royalty, presidents, celebrities all go, and it is broadcast live on tv in Italy, France and Germany. Usually it’s a cracker of a night: in 2007 it was an astounding Tristan und Isolde, a classic performance (which is available on DVD), in 2008 an interesting Don Carlo with a Don Carlo who looked a lot like Humpty Dumpty, and last year Das Rheingold with the brilliant René Pape as Wotan. But 2009? That was the year Daniel Barenboim conducted Carmen with his new find Anita Rachvelishvili.

I heard reports of the performance and thought it was just opera-bitchery. No one could be that bad, not at the season opening. I got hold of a copy of the video from the usual sources and watched it. I couldn’t make it to the end of the first act. She was not good. What did Barenboim see in her? I will add, a couple of things were worth watching: Jonas Kaufmann’s performance of the Flower Aria and the look on Rachvelishvili's and Barenboim's faces at the curtain calls when they realised people were booing. I thought, well we won’t see any more of her. Famous last words.

It was a traditional production, over thirty years old, but it still looked good. Heidi Stober (Micaela) has a great voice, not ‘girly’ like most Micaelas, but still looks the ‘angelic girl next door’. Andrew Richards, the substitute Don José, has a good light tenor, but is not someone you would expect to be singing lead at a first-rank house like the Deutsche Oper. His voice really only works at high volume – his tone at the pianissimo in the Flower Duet was thin and colourless. (Listen to Kaufmann on YouTube to hear how it should be done.) Bastiaan Everink (Escamillo) sang ahead of the orchestra consistently, and his spoken dialogue was totally unintelligible; it could have been in Klingon and no one would have known.

And Rachvelishvili? A big, HUGE voice that can fill a big hall with the greatest of ease. That’s what they see in her: a big voice, well-produced right through her range. But so boring. No character, no individuality, and no flexibility. She can sing two ways, loud or not at all. And no stage presence. Carmen is a man eater, but Rachvelishvili's Carmen couldn’t eat an orange.

At the interval Megan said, ‘Let’s go.’ I didn’t need to have my arm twisted. We paid our respects at Bizet’s grave when we visited Pere Lachaise in Paris; I’ll bet there are some strange whirring sounds coming from it tonight.

Anyway, the kids seemed to be having a great time, and I don’t begrudge them that one bit.

Postscript: My extremely rude comments above do not seem to have affected Ms Rachvelishvili's career one bit, as she has gone on to considerable success across Europe and America. She has developed a greater flexibility and control in her voice, and may yet become one of the great mezzos of our time. [Dec 2018]