Eccentric and exhilarating but never dull

Opera Macbeth Festival Theatre, Edinburgh

Widely rated in the top flight of Italian operatic establishments – though the bar is not set very high, to be candid – the Teatro Regio in Turin has been musically led for the last decade by Gianandrea Noseda, a conductor familiar to British audiences through

his long and distinguished association with the BBC Philharmonic and London Symphony orchestras.

He has brought his Regio forces to Edinburgh this year, and what he contributes to its production of Verdi’s

Macbeth is exhilarating – a taut, crisp and virile account of the fiery score, executed in the pit with discipline and rigour. Noseda favours a mix of the 1847 and 1865 versions of the opera: I’m not convinced this is ideal, but the performance wasn’t dull for a minute.

Anna Pirozzi and Dalibor Jenis, both known to Covent Garden audiences, sang the leading roles. They gave vocally robust, no-nonsense readings, hitting all the notes fair and square, if without subtlety. Piero Pretti stormed the barn in grand style with Macduff ’s aria; Marko Mimica made a rather lugubrious and woolly Banquo. The chorus was hearty. Emma Dante, of Sicilian extraction, created a quaint but rather endearing staging. Prominence is given to a sizeable corps

de ballet that reels and writhes through the witches’ lucubrations, livens up the Macbeths’ unfortunate soirée with some tumbling, and emerges from a forest of prickly pears when Birnam Wood comes to Dunsinane. Mostly, it serves as an irritant, though its presence in the shadowy tableau in which Macduff, surrounded by white-sheeted corpses, vows vengeance on tyranny was soberly effective.

Elsewhere there were some arresting ideas (the murdered Duncan sanctified by a solemn Pietà and the witches’ orgiastic mass birthing, for example) and quite a few risible ones (Lady Macbeth being pursued through the sleepwalking scene by a platoon of self-driving bloodstained hospital beds). The singers just got on with the job regardless of these eccentricities, and with Noseda firmly in control, the result was an evening that radiated an authentically Italian rawness and energy.