08.06.2026 CARMEN Asmik Grigorian Salzburg
The premiere of Georges Bizet's new production of Carmen at the Salzburg Festival on July 26, 2026, immediately became one of the most discussed opera premieres of the summer. The performance, staged by Gabriela Carrizo with the participation of her Peeping Tom dance troupe and conducted by Theodor Currentzis at the head of the Utopia Orchestra and Utopia Choir, not only divided the critics, but also revealed several key lines of today's conversation about opera: how to read "Carmen" today after discussions about femicide, how far the director can go in analyzing male violence what happens to Bizet's music if you return it to its early authorial layers, and how musical subtlety correlates with visual overload on the big festival stage. The range of estimates turned out to be wide, but not chaotic. Almost all critics agree on one thing: Hasmik Grigoryan, in her role-playing debut, became the undisputed center of the performance, and the vocal ensemble turned out to be at the level of the largest festival event of the season. The debate begins when it comes to Carrizo's direction, the volume of Peeping Tom's dance layer, the role of electronic sound interventions, and Currentzis' conducting strategy, which in this production offered not just a personal interpretation, but also work with an earlier, less familiar version of Bizet's score. Among the German—language texts, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung review has special weight - not only as the opinion of one critic, but as a framework in which the main advantages and main problems of the play converge. Already in the first sentence, F.A.Z. formulates the double optics of the production: "Carmen" at the Salzburg Festival lives off its intense physicality, but only Hasmik Grigoryan gets an individual profile in this giant machine of images. It is this balance of admiration and doubt that makes F.A.Z.'s text quite interesting to study. The critic admits that the play is likely to be remembered for its "stunning visuals" and "remarkably built titular figure," but at the same time believes that these advantages themselves indicate the internal weaknesses of the production. According to the author, the gigantic Großes Festspielhaus stage is in principle unsuitable for the initially intimate, conversational, nervous nature of Bizey's opéra-comique, and Carrizo overcomes this gap not through dramatic precision, but through opulence, turbulence and a series of powerful images. Hence one of the most important reproaches: what Bizet had as a moving conversational theater here turns into a grand opera somewhere between Meyerbeer and Strauss's "Woman without a Shadow." All dialogues are deleted, the speech fabric is dissolved, the action is divided into visual blocks, and instead of words, pantomimes, ritual chants, dance doubles and electronic collages appear. In this, F.A.Z. sees not only courage, but also danger: the musical and psychological profile of the work is partially absorbed by the spectacle. At the same time, F.A.Z. is far from a simple denial. On the contrary, the review constantly notes that it is in its imaginative sequence that the play impresses. And in the finale, when the entire massive figurative machine suddenly recedes and Carmen and Jose are left on stage almost alone, without parallel layers and without overload, the production acquires that degree of simplicity and ruthlessness that the critic seems to have been waiting for all evening: murder becomes "the last intimacy" and almost a form of double suicide. Space, rock, light: how critics saw the set design If opinions differ sharply in the ratings of the director, then the set design by Christoph Hetzer and the lighting by Tom Visser evoke an almost physical reaction from most critics. Even where the production is criticized, the visual framework of the play is rarely challenged as weak; rather, it is argued whether it is too subordinate to everything else. F.A.Z. describes the stage as a "bare monumental" area in which the massive rocks of the Menchsberg seem to be pressed into the theater space from all sides. Stone platforms, a pond, ghostly twilight skies, and then, in the finale, a blood—red light that fades to twilight fading, against which the rock blocks slowly move closer.: It is an image of a world that is literally impossible to escape from. Space here does not illustrate the action, but puts pressure on it, sets the fatal mechanics of fate and narrows the possibilities for any "life" or everyday movement. Salzburger Nachrichten finds a different but related image for this scene: instead of Seville, the viewer finds himself in a "moonscape" of bone mills and mines, where people are drawn into the bowels of the earth like ants. Carrizo replaces the southern Spanish picturesqueness with the inner world of a mining company, and the gray-black materiality of the space emphasizes the theme of coercion, labor, underground violence and a deformed male community.
The premiere of Georges Bizet's new production of Carmen at the Salzburg Festival on July 26, 2026, immediately became one of the most discussed opera premieres of the summer. The performance, staged by Gabriela Carrizo with the participation of her Peeping Tom dance troupe and conducted by Theodor Currentzis at the head of the Utopia Orchestra and Utopia Choir, not only divided the critics, but also revealed several key lines of today's conversation about opera: how to read "Carmen" today after discussions about femicide, how far the director can go in analyzing male violence what happens to Bizet's music if you return it to its early authorial layers, and how musical subtlety correlates with visual overload on the big festival stage. The range of estimates turned out to be wide, but not chaotic. Almost all critics agree on one thing: Hasmik Grigoryan, in her role-playing debut, became the undisputed center of the performance, and the vocal ensemble turned out to be at the level of the largest festival event of the season. The debate begins when it comes to Carrizo's direction, the volume of Peeping Tom's dance layer, the role of electronic sound interventions, and Currentzis' conducting strategy, which in this production offered not just a personal interpretation, but also work with an earlier, less familiar version of Bizet's score. Among the German—language texts, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung review has special weight - not only as the opinion of one critic, but as a framework in which the main advantages and main problems of the play converge. Already in the first sentence, F.A.Z. formulates the double optics of the production: "Carmen" at the Salzburg Festival lives off its intense physicality, but only Hasmik Grigoryan gets an individual profile in this giant machine of images. It is this balance of admiration and doubt that makes F.A.Z.'s text quite interesting to study. The critic admits that the play is likely to be remembered for its "stunning visuals" and "remarkably built titular figure," but at the same time believes that these advantages themselves indicate the internal weaknesses of the production. According to the author, the gigantic Großes Festspielhaus stage is in principle unsuitable for the initially intimate, conversational, nervous nature of Bizey's opéra-comique, and Carrizo overcomes this gap not through dramatic precision, but through opulence, turbulence and a series of powerful images. Hence one of the most important reproaches: what Bizet had as a moving conversational theater here turns into a grand opera somewhere between Meyerbeer and Strauss's "Woman without a Shadow." All dialogues are deleted, the speech fabric is dissolved, the action is divided into visual blocks, and instead of words, pantomimes, ritual chants, dance doubles and electronic collages appear. In this, F.A.Z. sees not only courage, but also danger: the musical and psychological profile of the work is partially absorbed by the spectacle. At the same time, F.A.Z. is far from a simple denial. On the contrary, the review constantly notes that it is in its imaginative sequence that the play impresses. And in the finale, when the entire massive figurative machine suddenly recedes and Carmen and Jose are left on stage almost alone, without parallel layers and without overload, the production acquires that degree of simplicity and ruthlessness that the critic seems to have been waiting for all evening: murder becomes "the last intimacy" and almost a form of double suicide. Space, rock, light: how critics saw the set design If opinions differ sharply in the ratings of the director, then the set design by Christoph Hetzer and the lighting by Tom Visser evoke an almost physical reaction from most critics. Even where the production is criticized, the visual framework of the play is rarely challenged as weak; rather, it is argued whether it is too subordinate to everything else. F.A.Z. describes the stage as a "bare monumental" area in which the massive rocks of the Menchsberg seem to be pressed into the theater space from all sides. Stone platforms, a pond, ghostly twilight skies, and then, in the finale, a blood—red light that fades to twilight fading, against which the rock blocks slowly move closer.: It is an image of a world that is literally impossible to escape from. Space here does not illustrate the action, but puts pressure on it, sets the fatal mechanics of fate and narrows the possibilities for any "life" or everyday movement. Salzburger Nachrichten finds a different but related image for this scene: instead of Seville, the viewer finds himself in a "moonscape" of bone mills and mines, where people are drawn into the bowels of the earth like ants. Carrizo replaces the southern Spanish picturesqueness with the inner world of a mining company, and the gray-black materiality of the space emphasizes the theme of coercion, labor, underground violence and a deformed male community.