Scottish Opera’s new Carmen begins at the end. ‘Take me away: I have killed her,’ intones a voiceover and as the prelude swaggers out, José is in a police interrogation cell, where an investigator is attempting to piece together his story. In other words, it’s CSI: Seville. In converting Meilhac and Halévy’s libretto into a police procedural, director John Fulljames has created a Carmen that’s ideally gauged to a TV-literate audience: told in flashback, with any confusion swiftly cleared up by spoken dialogue that never feels clunky because interrogation is central to the genre.

And unless you want to be surprised by the dénouement, it works a treat. Is that whopping spoiler really such a big deal? I’m in two minds: Opera subscribers might roll their eyes, but a significant proportion of any given opera audience will inevitably comprise first-timers. Of course the cliché-busting updated Carmen is itself one of contemporary opera’s great clichés. Barring Ellen Kent’s touring productions (she boasted that every orange tree on stage bore genuine Seville oranges), I’ve never actually seen a Carmen set in 19th-century Spain. It’s been tracksuit bottoms, greasy sideburns and plastic chairs all the way. True to form, Fulljames’s smugglers are gun-running terrorists and the soldiers are incompetent but brutal security guards.

But Fulljames is far too skilled a director to make these familiar gambits feel routine. Since we already know where we’re going, he harnesses the strengths of his cast to make the journey as compelling as possible – a process that gets a long way on a central pairing as magnetic as Justina Gringyte (Carmen) and Alok Kumar (José). Gringyte’s voice is as smokey and as insinuating as it was in ENO’s 2020 revival of Carmen (Calixto Bieito: 1970s leisurewear, sleazy dive-bars, etc) but it seems to have grown even more satisfyingly rich and dark in the bottom register. Consonants rasp on her tongue like burned caramel. 

Kumar’s tenor is not pretty-pretty but it is certainly ardent. There’s something in the way he socks those top notes towards the gods which makes it plausible that this nice lad in his leisurewear could be capable of ultra-violence. Then there’s Hye-Youn Lee – a very sweet and vulnerable Micaela – and Phillip Rhodes, a rare Escamillo (Fulljames allows him to remain a bullfighter) with both the physical charisma and vocal chops to feel legitimately seductive. When Christopher Cowell’s English translation is good, it’s very good, and the score (slightly cut) gets its due from Dane Lam, whose conducting never drags or sags but gives Bizet’s melodies room to fly.

The result is a briskly paced but very lyrical Carmen, with the interrogation sequences moving the story smartly along and projections displaying the assembled evidence – polaroids, tarot cards, bullfight tickets – on the back wall of the abstract set, as the Investigator (Carmen Pieraccini, in a wholly spoken role) assembles her incident board. It sounds obvious, in retrospect, but clichés only become stale if their context is unimaginative and Fulljames’s reinvention is alert, inventive and wholly invested in its premise. The audience in Glasgow appeared gripped, and Inverness, Aberdeen and Edinburgh are in for a thoroughly entertaining night when it goes on tour.

Deborah Warner’s Wozzeck, meanwhile, begins with someone taking a shit on stage. Seriously: there’s a row of loos and a luckless chorus member has been delegated to drop his kecks and… well, anyway, point taken. We’re about to stare directly at the squalid underbelly of the human condition, which is kind of the deal when you buy tickets for Wozzeck. What’s really upsetting about a great performance of Berg’s opera isn’t the cruelty so much as the beauty – the brief, desperate flickers of human warmth or of natural wonders; the hopeless intimation of a more compassionate world elsewhere.

That’s certainly what emerged from this performance, with the master lieder-singer Christian Gerhaher colouring every syllable as a grizzled, puzzled Wozzeck, Anja Kampe upsettingly tender and radiant as Marie; and Peter Hoare and Brindley Sherratt playing the Captain and the Doctor respectively as stinging, carping caricatures. Pappano’s quicksilver conducting and Hyemi Shin’s shifting, sliding sets evoked the shadows and apocalyptic blazes of Wozzeck’s troubled imagination. Glinting shards of string tone, red-raw scars of light and skeletal trees all worked together to sketch the inner and outer landscape of a collapsing mind.

It was often piercingly beautiful, and I’ve been trying to analyse why it failed to generate the overwhelming emotional impact that you’d expect. Possibly Gerhaher was just too self-aware. And as with her Peter Grimes, there’s something reductive about Warner’s habit of presenting the working class as undifferentiated, animalistic thugs. It’s an impressive piece of work nonetheless. Oh, and if you’re the individual who applauded, ostentatiously, before the last note had even started to fade, then you, sir or madam, are an arse.