Bizet: Carmen Highlights – Solti

Every generation gets the Carmen it deserves, or thinks it does, and the mid-1970s apparently wanted one that gleamed like a new Jaguar — all chrome and horsepower, not much dust on the upholstery. That’s Solti’s Carmen, or at least this highlights disc drawn from it, and it tells you as much about an era’s taste in glamour as it does about Bizet.

Start with the obvious: this was a dream-team assemblage by the old-fashioned Decca logic of stacking up whoever was hottest that season and hoping the chemistry sorted itself out in the editing room. Sometimes it does. Sometimes you get moments that justify the whole expensive gamble — the José-Micaëla duet here is one of them, a genuine meeting of two remarkable instruments at the height of their sheen. Domingo’s tone in these years had a bronze warmth that just poured out, seemingly without effort, and Te Kanawa matched him phrase for phrase with that silvery, faintly veiled sound she had before the crossover records taught her bad habits — a wisp of breath creeping into the tone, a tendency to sell rather than sing. None of that here. This is Te Kanawa still trusting the line, still letting Puccini’s cousin-composer’s phrases breathe on their own.

Domingo’s Don José is likewise a document of a voice at its physical peak, not yet worried about the top, throwing off that “Flower Song” with a kind of unthinking generosity — though it’s worth noting the odd rhythmic impatience that creeps into his phrasing between lines, a small tell that even golden-age tenors fudge the architecture when the emotional temperature rises. His French, too, has the occasional soft edge, vowels slightly Hispanicized. Nobody in 1975 seemed to mind. I’m not sure I mind much now.

Troyanos is the more complicated case, and history has been kind to her reputation in ways this particular recording doesn’t quite earn. She stepped in for Shirley Verrett at Covent Garden, and you sense throughout an artist working slightly against the grain of the studio microphone rather than with it. Her entrance recitative crackles — real danger there, real Spanish sun on the words. But once the set pieces arrive, the “Habanera” chief among them, something clamps down. The vowels go dark and covered, generic almost, as though she’s protecting the voice rather than spending it. By the Card Scene — which ought to chill the blood, Bizet’s fate-motif grinding away underneath like a millstone — you can barely parse what she’s singing, for all her evident conviction. It’s frustrating because you can hear the interpretive intelligence working; the technical follow-through just isn’t there to deliver it.

Van Dam I have always admired — a musician’s player, elegant, scrupulous, the sort of artist who never embarrasses himself. Which makes his Escamillo doubly strange. He barks his way through the Toreador Song, hitting downbeats as though they’d personally wronged him, sacrificing legato for a swagger that doesn’t suit his native refinement. Compare his later, more settled account for Karajan, or the leaner, more idiomatic one he made earlier for Lombard on Erato — both preferable, both proof that toreadors, like wines, sometimes need proper aging.

And Solti — well, Solti conducting French repertoire was always a slightly contested proposition, wasn’t it. The precision is there, certainly; those brass chords in the Prélude have real weight and cushion, a sonic plushness Decca’s engineers knew how to bottle better than anyone. But listen to the string underpinning beneath José’s “Ce baiser” in the Micaëla duet — it swells with an almost Wagnerian insistence that Bizet, writing chamber-scaled ardor, never asked for. Elsewhere the bass pizzicati sound tentative, occasionally early, and the notoriously boomy Decca sonics of this vintage don’t help — everything down there is inflated, thickened, as though viewed through frosted glass.

Is it a great Carmen? No — Callas/Prêtre still burns hotter psychologically, and Abbado’s later, leaner disc with Berganza corrects a lot of this interpretive puffiness. But as a souvenir of specific, extraordinary voices caught mid-flight, on a specific hot studio afternoon nearly fifty years gone, this disc still has real, undeniable pull. Just don’t expect subtlety. Expect chrome.