Bizet: Carmen (1978)

This 1977 recording of Carmen was based on a production from the Edinburgh Festival and includes most of the cast from that production with the exception of Ileana Cotrubas as Micaëla and Sherrill Milnes as Escamillo. Claudio Abbado conducts the London Symphony Orchestra, which plays with crisp precision and vitality. The evaluation of any performance of Carmen is complicated by the variety of editions available, the primary ones being the traditional version that uses recitatives set to music by Ernst Guiraud after the ... Read More

This 1977 recording of Carmen was based on a production from the Edinburgh Festival and includes most of the cast from that production with the exception of Ileana Cotrubas as Micaëla and Sherrill Milnes as Escamillo. Claudio Abbado conducts the London Symphony Orchestra, which plays with crisp precision and vitality. The evaluation of any performance of Carmen is complicated by the variety of editions available, the primary ones being the traditional version that uses recitatives set to music by Ernst Guiraud after the composer's death and the 1964 Fritz Oeser edition that uses the original spoken recitatives, but that reintroduces music Bizet discarded before the premiere. Most conductors using the spoken dialogue omit some or all of the discarded music, but Abbado includes it, and the result feels choppy and uneven, particularly in the first act. That effect is exacerbated by Abbado's performance. His tempos are frequently eccentrically slow or fast, without any apparent rationale, and he doesn't... Read Less