So last night at the Tranzac, as part of Against the Grain’s Opera Pub, Queen Hezumuryango and Ryan Nauta did a version of the “Seguidilla” from Bizet’s Carmen but with the roles reversed. It was the Pride Edition after all. Turns out it’s not the first time I’ve heard Carmen gender bent. Not so long ago I heard Korin Thomas-Smith sing the “Habanera”.
So what, I asked myself, would a completely gender bent Carmen look like and would it work. Set it in some female led society and i think you can swap all the roles pretty easily. Michaele would be sort of like Werther; a bit of a mummy’s boy. Escamilla would still be a bullfighter. A cowfighter would be silly! The rest of the characters work with minimal adjustment I think. And for once it woudn’t be the soprano who got the chop.
BTW, the rest of Opera Pub was pretty good too with even more gender bending as Ryan also sang “Quondo men vo”. There was a really nice account by Queen of “Printemps qui commence” from Saint-Saëns’ The Barber of Gaza Samson et Dalila. There was Mozart and art song and lots of musical theatre numbers. And Greg Finney got in some G&S (try stopping him!).
And that’s a wrap on Opera Pub for 2025/26 but it will be back at the Tranzac in the Fall.
Tuesday’s RBA concert with members of the Ensemble Studio was themed around composer rivalries though not the really toxic ones. No Mozart/Salieri or Wagner/Meyerbeer here! The most convincing as a rivalry was the first; Berlioz vs Rossini. So Queen Hezumuryango sang “Le spectre de la rose” with some sensitive handling of the text and a pretty fiery “Cruda sorte” from L’Italiana in Algeri with plenty of emotion. I definitely like her voice more when she’s going for drama as she’s got plenty of power and expressiveness.
operaramblings 