If you try to get tickets too late, you simply won’t make it to Carmen at the Salzburger Festspiele—the first opera production by Peeping Tom choreographer Gabriela Carrizo. But at least Arte is streaming a recording in its online media library until early November. It’s not a true substitute, of course; a recording can’t capture the moment the champagne-sipping audience encounters Carrizo’s gritty, barefoot, sweat-drenched social realism.
Carrizo also strips Georges Bizet’s Carmen—which premiered in 1875—of its romanticized Andalusian setting. Christof Hetzer’s set design presents a dark, inhospitable "non-place" where soldiers and factory workers rush about aimlessly—encountering a rise in the ground here, a puddle there—in a bleak, hostile environment. And because the setting is ...
