The mezzo-soprano Aigul Akhmetshina has sung the title role in Bizet’s “Carmen” in some of the world’s greatest opera houses, including at the Metropolitan Opera, where she is performing through Friday. She has also recorded one of the best versions of the opera’s Habanera you’ll ever hear.
On Akhmetshina’s self-titled debut album, she makes her case as Carmen almost immediately. At the start of the Habanera, she compares love to a rebellious bird, wild and free, singing, “L’amour est un oiseau rebelle.” As Akhmetshina turns the line into an intense seduction, you can hear the elements — vocal color, range, mood — that make her version of this aria nearly definitive. It’s a gateway recording: the kind you recommend to someone who’s about to go see the opera.
The Habanera is a well-known tune in an opera full of them. Its versatile appeal has been used to sell Pepsi (in the voice of Beyoncé), entertain children on “Sesame Street” and fill in the soundtrack for figure-skating routines and films like “Up” and “Trainspotting.”
Akhmetshina’s Habanera announces the arrival of a dangerous siren with the timbre of her voice alone. A full, luscious sound unspools with patient force as she inches her way down the aria’s slinky, chromatic melody.
“You can interpret Habanera in so many ways,” she said in an interview, “and it’s such a tricky aria because it sounds very simple.” It’s based on a dance rhythm, with a verse-chorus-verse-chorus structure and textual repetitions about birds and bohemian children. The challenge is to keep it interesting. “It’s so easy to make her just seducing and just very sexy, and that’s it,” Akhmetshina said, adding that that’s a quick way to put the audience to sleep.
To keep it fresh, she said, she reconnects with the material as she steps onstage. The singer playing Carmen gets the briefest of introductions — a few lines of dialogue and some famous hits from the cello — before diving into what is arguably opera’s sexiest tune. In those moments, Akhmetshina said, she decides whether her Habanera will be grounded, light, aggressive or philosophical.
Her plump instrument, with its chiaroscuro quality, balancing light and dark tones, satisfies contemporary tastes. There’s a gleam around the edges of its round, opaque surface, like the glow encircling a total eclipse. You can even hear it in a single word like “l’amour!” (“love!”). Twentieth century favorites like Teresa Berganza sounded different. Berganza was comparatively light, flirty and vulnerable, the texture of her voice a delicate silk compared to Akhmetshina’s plush velvet.
These two go-to Carmens share an advantage: The aria’s range suits them perfectly. When the Habanera moves into the refrain, the key shifts from minor to major, and Carmen compares love to a carefree, bohemian child: “L’amour est enfant de bohème.” The singsong melody crisscrosses the divide between low and middle voice, and Akhmetshina seamlessly rides that wave with no discernible break. Her voice just fits. Agnes Baltsa, a languid, stylish Carmen, was similarly blessed, but Shirley Verrett had an awkward time of it, breaking into chesty low notes in a 1973 performance.
Color and range alone do not a Carmen make. Marilyn Horne, with a brassy timbre and low center of gravity to her voice, turned the Habanera into camp spectacle, as though Ethel Merman got dropped into a Marx Brothers sketch.
Which brings us to the question of interpretation. “For me now, my Habanera feels very boring,” Akhmetshina said of her recording. (She is entitled to her wrong opinion.) If she were to record it again, she said, she would soften the phrasing and play more with the words. “I’m always searching for different colors.”
Where some singers underplay the first verse’s subtext, Akhmetshina wraps a benign line, about Carmen’s preference for quiet guys, in a dangerous heat. When she eventually advises potential lovers, “Prends garde à toi!” (“Beware!”), she sings it as an afterthought, because they’ve already had ample warning to gird their loins.
Her current ideal, she said, is a “cabaret” Carmen. She imagines sauntering from table to table in a smoky room as she sings the Habanera with a chanteuse’s plain-spoken intimacy. She doesn’t want it to be stuffy or overly operatic. “It’s not a turkey!” she said of the lyric’s rebellious bird. “She’s light and free.”
One of her favorite Carmens, Julia Migenes, who gave a sizzling, naturalistic performance in a 1984 film, approaches that ideal. The second verse of the Habanera is full of phonetic repetitions, and Migenes twists and pulls them with a sensual, nasally drawl. “It sounds like she speaks, with all the intonations, because the word is the most important part,” Akhmetshina said.
At the Met recently, you could hear Akhmetshina experimenting with these ideas. She held back her vibrato for a more slender sound, almost like a bass clarinet, as she descended the aria’s chromatic scale.
“I still haven’t done my best Carmen,” Akhmetshina said. “If one day I will do that, probably that will be the day when I will stop singing her.”
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