Martínez sang well on opening night, but she failed to receive a heartfelt “Brava!” from the audience after any of her arias. Carmen taunts the imposing soldiers in the very first scene: “cut me, burn me, I won’t say a thing.” Carmen is one tough cookie. “L'amour est un oiseau rebelle,” she sings. She must take the wheel and steer the opera to its conclusion. There should be the sense that Carmen is conducting each of her arias in this opera, not the conductor in the pit. Maria Callas could change your life with just her habanera, even in a simple concert setting. Julia Migenes-Johnson was a great Carmen. Carmen is a role to be seized, asserted, thrown in your face. What of Ana María Martínez in title role? She is a singer I’ve admired greatly, but here she seems to have a problem with what I’ll term “Divability factor.” She’s at about 6, when she needs to be at 10. The balance between orchestra and singer is off in many places, all of them favoring the loud orchestra, except when the powerful HGO chorus takes over. Much of it is just too slow, but not so slow as to be deeply stylized, like Leonard Bernstein’s famous recording. He plods and dawdles, however, with this Carmen. Two years ago, conductor Rory Macdonald did a thrilling job with HGO’s Rape of Lucretia. It’s like he’s stumbled in from another theater, where he was supposed to have been dancing the Minotaur in Martha Graham’s Errand Into the Maze. Now and then he gets lifted by a toreador in an odd duet. He shows up whenever the music gets dark and moody, splays his fingers and then does a couple of pirouettes before running off stage. Perhaps the most ridiculous role in this production is the one given to solo dancer Rasta Thomas, who appears shirtless in high-waisted black tights and a longhorn mask. This is a difficult shift, however, for opera fans to make after HGO’s groundbreaking Das Rheingold. The set and costume designs are mostly traditional. There is some hackneyed dancing here and there, from director and choreographer Rob Ashford, which makes the whole thing feel more like Carmen Miranda than Carmen.

Houston carmen opera