Carmen - Salzburg Festival 2026 - Carmen - Salzburger Festspiele 2026, Gabriela Carrizo

Description

A new production for the 2026 Salzburg Festival

Through its programming, the 2026 Salzburg Festival aims to explore, among other themes, the boundaries between reason and emotion. The Festival presents Georges Bizet’s Carmen in a new production by director and choreographer Gabriela Carrizo, of the company Peeping Tom.

In this new production of Carmen, Gabriela Carrizo does not approach Bizet’s opera merely as a drama of passion defined by its famous arias; instead, she transforms it into a realm of inner exploration, a space of tension where bodies, desires, and hidden wounds surface beneath the myth. True to the aesthetic of Peeping Tom, sharing a stage language characterized by physical intensity, visual poetry, and layered meanings, she seeks not so much to illustrate the plot as to reveal its underlying forces.

At the heart of her interpretation lie Carmen (sung by Asmik Grigorian) and Don José (Jonathan Tetelman). They are not simply figures caught in the machinery of romantic fate; rather, they are two consciousnesses grappling with conflicting impulses, power dynamics, and deep-seated personal fractures. Carrizo focuses on conveying what lies beyond words: attraction as a dizzying vertigo, freedom as a threat, and attachment as possession. In this vision, Carmen is no longer merely an icon of independence or seduction; she becomes an elusive, shifting presence—almost luminous in her refusal to be pinned down.

The production also promises to expand the scope of the drama to encompass its human and social context. Family ties, the figure of Don José’s mother, the presence of Micaëla (Kristina Mkhitaryan), the embodiment of a femininity deemed "respectable", and Escamillo (Davide Luciano), with his overt virility: the director treats none of these as mere supporting roles. Instead, they form a network of forces that guide, constrain, or destabilize the protagonists. In doing so, Gabriela Carrizo seems to shift Carmen away from the realm of romantic tragedy and toward a meditation on otherness – on that which disturbs, attracts, and ultimately tips the balance.

Carrizo’s interpretation seeks less to recreate a specific world than to express a state of inner turmoil: that of individuals who barely recognize themselves, caught in the grip of their own contradictions. Under her direction, Carmen becomes more than just a free-spirited heroine confronting a jealous man; she emerges as a figure of friction between desire and fear, between the impulse to reach out to another and the need to possess them. The intensity of the staging promises to be matched by the musical direction, entrusted here to the maverick Teodor Currentzis, leading his Utopia Orchestra.

Further information is available on the Festival’s official website.