“Carmen” at the DECC’s Symphony Hall was a joint production of the Duluth Superior Symphony Orchestra and the Lyric Opera of the North. If the response of the capacity crowd in attendance on Saturday night was any indication, this first time is the not going to be the last time this happens.

Georges Bizet’s popular opera was staged as a concert, albeit one with costumes and props (“everything but walls”). The 10th Anniversary Concert version of “Les Misérables” most notably took this same approach and was vastly superior to the wretched movie version of the operatic musical, so I actually have a fondness for this type of musical presentation.

The DSSO got the stage to themselves at the start of each act for Bizet’s instrumental preludes setting the mood for the next set of scenes to come. More than most operas, the orchestra is a prime part of the equation in “Carmen.” Bizet’s friend Ernest Guiraud posthumously compiled two suites of orchestra music drawn from the opera’s score, evidence the music is perfectly capable of standing on its own. I had no fears that Dirk Meyer would make the mistake a few conductors have made with the opening prelude by reducing the tempo, and the orchestra attacked the score with their customary intensity.

For Victoria Vargas, the title role is certainly front-loaded, with the Habanera (“L’amour est un oiseau rebelle”) coming on the heels of her entrance in Act 1. However, her “Tra la la … Coupe-moi, brûle” was equally effective, and Vargas made the most of “Quant au douanier, c’est notre affaire” in Act 3, when she divines her fate in the cards that tell her dark future. The Carmen we heard for the rest of the opera was not the same one who first sashayed onto the stage, providing the appropriate gravitas for the opera’s tragic turn. Vargas also did more running than any Carmen I have ever seen, including a full sprint up the auditorium aisle.

The character of Don Jose is certainly no Don Juan, but Scott Ramsay turns his Act 2 “La fleur que tu m’avais jetee” into a heartfelt declaration of love that suddenly transforms the love-struck sergeant of the dragoons into a rather credible romantic figure. This is the pivotal aria in the opera, and Ramsay carried it off very effectively. More importantly, the tenor fully captured the emotions of the final confrontation with Carmen, and reaffirmed the belief that singing the notes is one thing, but feeling them is what it is really all about in a night at the opera.

Andrew Gangestad’s big voice was a strong presence throughout the evening as Captain Zuniga, while Gabriel Preisser made an equally strong impression as Escamillo the Toreador, with a strong offering of the Toreador Song (“Votre toast, je peux vous le rendre”). The lyric baritone also enjoyed the comic relief his character brought to the proceedings.

The biggest crowd pleasers of the evening were the other four singers who made up a recurring quintet with Carmen: Vicki Fingalson and Rebecca Farmer as Carmen’s companions and Marcus McConico and Jeffrey Madison as a pair of smugglers. The group’s numbers in Acts 2 and 3 were rather delightful, and one of the highlights of the evening was Fingalson and Farmer’s performance of “Melons! Coupons!” One of the enduring appeals of “Carmen” for performers has to be that the second soprano and mezzo-soprano on the roster get moments like this on stage.

The music played by the DSSO certainly made it to the back of the hall, but the same could not always be said for the solo voices, although the DSSO chorus could be heard just fine, amply proven by the big finish to Act 3. Granted, I could not have been sitting farther back on the main floor since there was only one more row behind mine, but there were times when the solo voices had maybe 70 percent of the volume of the orchestra, with notes sung in the lower vocal register suffering the most.

This was rather disconcerting at times, especially during “Parle-moi de ma mere.” Along with the Habanera and the Toreador Song this was the aria, which I consider the most beautiful one in the opera, that I was most looking forward to hearing. But as Micaela, Rachel Inselman was simply overwhelmed by the orchestra.

Of course, in this configuration the orchestra is perfectly situated beneath their symphonic shell, while the singers are outside of it, standing downstage on the apron. Therein may well lie all the difference. Stage director Robert Neu was clearly aware of this problem, because as often as possible his singers ended up downstage, center, directly facing the audience.

In Act 3 when Micaela sang “Je dis que rien ne m’epouvante” from atop a mountain (at the top of the riser at the back of the stage), she could be heard much better and she ended that aria with the loveliest note of the evening. This would seem to confirm my working hypothesis on the sound disparity between orchestra and singers.

A translation of the lyrics was projected on a screen high above the conductor’s head, a post-modern operatic convention that I tend to ignore, since the emotional resonance of opera comes from the singing more so than the lyrics. But I actually ended up paying attention to the surtitles more than usual, because Neu really played up the humor in this production, starting with a very comic staging of Micaela’s initial meeting with the soldiers.

Then the dragoons were singing, “Here come the shameless flirts, smoking cigarettes,” which made the lovely little choral piece that followed, devoted to watching smoke rise in the air, pretty funny. Consequently, there were several times when the audience was laughing and I had to glance up at the surtitles to catch up with the hilarity.

That being said, the humor ended up being a double-edge sword in this production. By intermission the audience was absolutely willing to see humor in just about anything. The setting for Act 3 announced as “A wild spot in the mountains” earned a chuckle. But then Micaela got a big laugh for her line, “Wait, there is something else I must tell you,” and the news from home about mom was not even remotely funny. By the time we got to Act 4 it seemed Carmen was more aware of her impending doom than the audience (she shows up dressed completely in black, which is never a good sign).

Neu also made nice use of the auditorium aisle, especially for the arrival of Escamillo and the toreadors at the start of the final act, which made up for the risers seating the chorus necessitating the cast having to walk up one set of stairs before they descended another to “enter” the scene. The director also came up with a truly memorable staging of the fatal finale in terms of the how Don Jose’s knife is used the first and then the last time, underscored by the stage lights going blood red.

Ann Gumpper’s sparse but effective scenic design for the concert consisted of a pair of flanking buildings, whose elongated shapes were rather reminiscent of the paintings of El Greco, and a tattered maroon curtain arrayed across the proscenium arch. A couple of scenic additions descended from above to help set the scenes for Act 2 and Act 3, another step away from the production strictly being just a conventional concert.

The spirit of collaboration between LOON and the DSSO extended to the program for the evening’s event, whose double-cover – a nice homage to “Mad” magazine’s 1960 post-election issue – momentarily perplexed some patrons. However, the hockey game next door had once again made parking at the DECC an absolute nightmare, so that each aria in Act 1 ended with applause, quickly followed by a dozen or more patrons scurrying down the aisles to find their seats. Is it just me or does it seem like every time the DSSO or Minnesota Ballet perform at the DECC there is a home hockey game at Amsoil Arena?

Parting thoughts: If this somewhat different approach to “Carmen” whetted your appetite for similar endeavors, there are a couple of film versions you might want to check out: The 1983 Spanish film adaptation directed and choreographed in flamenco style by Carlos Saura, and 2005’s “U-Carmen eKhayelitsha” from South Africa, shot entirely in Xhosa and combining Bizet’s music with traditional African music, the musical numbers recorded live on the set without any additional dubbing. The common denominator is that in neither version is the singing of primary importance, but each is compelling in its own way.