Taconic Opera Makes a New Home at Tarrytown Music Hall

The Taconic Opera has a new home – and a new take on an audience favorite.

With 26 of its 27 years spent with Yorktown Stage, the Peekskill-based company will now make its operatic debut at Tarrytown Music Hall with Georges Bizet’s Carmen on November 2 and 3. (The company had tested out the Hall in May, performing Maurice Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G major and Taconic Opera’s general director Dan Montez’s Piano Concerto in C minor, with Ravel expert Kessa Montez, Dan’s daughter, at the keyboard.)

“The Yorktown Stage closed up its orchestra pit, and we were left without a home,” says Dan Montez. Taconic Opera’s productions are staged with a full orchestra conducted by Jun Nakabayashi and supertitles, as opera subtitles are known.

The move to the Music Hall has turned out to be fortuitous. Montez refers to the site as “gorgeous” and “ornate,” and says it is perfect for a company whose reputation is growing, as evinced by its receipt of both state and federal (National Endowment for the Arts) grants.

The hall’s strategic locale, he adds, “helps us keep our audience on the Hudson while accessing Mount Kisco, Chappaqua and White Plains,” along with other central locales, potentially growing the company’s mailing list of 6,000 names.

Björn Olsson, the Music Hall’s executive director, thinks it’s a fitting move as well. He explains that the hall has a history of opera performances, which includes Carmen as well as Giuseppe Verdi’s Aida and Rigoletto, and Giacomo Puccini’s Tosca.

“I am really looking forward to the Taconic bringing Carmen here,” Olsson adds. “They have been the leading opera company in our area for decades, and I think especially this emotionally intense opera lends itself to a more intimate venue. My favorite Carmen productions were always the smaller ones, where the audience can be so close to the fiery action their eyebrows get singed.” 

It’s not clear if there were any singed eyebrows when the opera premiered in 1875 at Paris’ Opéra-Comique, but there certainly were raised ones. The story of a soldier’s obsession with the seductive, self-centered title character, a cigarette-factory worker and smuggler in Seville, shocked Paris with its frank depiction of modern love but soon found its footing in opera houses worldwide.

Montez says this has been due in large part to the melodic nature of the work, with audiences humming the Habanera, Seguidilla and the Toreador Song as they leave the theater. Carmen’s tunefulness undoubtedly contributes to its adaptability. It’s been interpreted for stage (Peter Brooks’ La Tragedie de Carmen); screen (The Loves of Carmen, Carmen Jones, Carmen: A Hip Hopera with Beyoncé); the ballet (Carmen Suite with Maya Plitsetskaya); flamenco (Carlos Saura’s Carmen), figure skating (Carmen on Ice with Katarina Witt); and the concert hall (including Vladimir Horowitz’s Variations on a Theme From ‘Carmen’).

The opera has been set in the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s and, at The Metropolitan Opera in January, as a story of sexual violence at the U.S.-Mexico border with a star turn by 27-year-old mezzo-soprano Aigul Akhmetshina in the title role. Montez – who is no stranger to Bizet, having staged his The Pearl Fishers twice and Carmen almost 20 years ago in a sell-out production – has a philosophy for updating:

“If you’re going to update a work, tell the same story.”

For this Carmen, director Montez has looked for modern equivalents to the setting. The cigarette factory where Carmen works has become a fast food restaurant; Don José, the soldier with a fatal attraction to Carmen, a policeman; and Escamillo, the toreador whose presence helps drive a wedge between Carmen and Don José, a football player.

These are characters that will be recognizable to an American audience, including the students who will be bused in from around Westchester County to see it on Nov. 1 before the opera opens to the public.

Adds Montez: “They are our favorite audience.”

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