Covent Garden has missed a trick. Back in October the Royal Opera’s staging of Carmen, in Francesca Zambello’s gorgeous production, paired Roberto Alagna’s Don José with one of the most sexually alluring operatic presences I have witnessed (although Danielle de Niese’s Cleopatra runs it close). My then seven-year-old companion, at her first opera, watched spellbound as the vocally supreme Latvian Elina Garanca seduced her audience with dances that would have shamed many of Stringfellows’ finest. The drama as José gradually disintegrated was palpable and Bertrand de Billy coaxed magical nuances from this house’s fine orchestra.

What a shame, then, that this was not the cast that the Royal Opera House has used for what it’s describing as the first 3D opera recording, using the next-generation digital technology already used for Avatar and Disney’s Alice in Wonderland. Carmen has been filmed at two special performances for release in the autumn at theatres able to show RealD 3D. The audiences (dressed remarkably casually) comprised Friends of Covent Garden and others seduced by ticket prices reduced from a normal £180 to £37.50 because the whole house was classified “restricted view” – which it certainly was. There were two huge mobile camera hoists located in the stalls, each capable of obscuring large parts of the stage, another remotely operated camera darting across the front of the stage throughout and a cameraman attached to a lifesize contraption wandering around the stage all night sticking his lens in the faces of this singer or that.

So the singers – and dancers – were acting in close-up and, as I observed while looking through binoculars, engaging in plenty of exaggerated facial acting. I can’t tell for now how it will all look in the finished 3D product. I’d have a bet it will look staggering. What looked great on the night (as well as some of the handsome sets) and sounded as good was the fabulous Micaela of another Latvian, the soprano Maija Kovalevska, one of a number of young singers making their house debuts in this series of performances.Here was someone in whose love for her José I could believe.

But a Carmen in which the Micaela steals the show cannot be deemed an unqualified success. And reliable though the British mezzo Christine Rice was in the title role, she could not match Garanca’s star quality. The American tenor Bryan Hymel was making his Royal Opera debut as a Don José who became progressively unhinged as the action unfolded without ever being completely compelling, or, indeed, vocally secure. Sad to say, the Escamillo of Greek baritone Aris Argiris, left me quite unmoved. I wondered what it was the wild gypsy girl was doing shacking up with this fellow and watched the denouement without shedding a tear.

Antony Craig, Gramophone Production Editor