BY Craig Smith [The New Mexican, 2 July 2006]

The Santa Fe Opera’s 50th-anniversary season opened Friday with musically lustrous, dramatically vivid reading of Bizet’s Carmen under the combined hands of SFO music director Alan Gilbert and director Lars Rudolfsson, and with acclaimed mezzo-soprano Anne Sofie von Otter making her company debut in the title role. It was as far from the Spanish travelogue type of production as you could get.