Carmen

Carmen is one of the most famous operas in the entire art form. The opera’s heady combination of passion, sensuality and violence initially proved too much for audiences at the premiere and its composer, Georges Bizet died shortly after, and never learned of the spectacular success his Carmen would achieve: the opera has been performed more than five hundred times at Covent Garden alone. Carmen is given a fresh point of view in Barrie Kosky’s highly physical production, and he has devised a far-from-traditional version, incorporating music written by Bizet for the score but not usually heard, and giving a new voice to the opera’s endlessly fascinating central character.