First-class way to mark 70 years of fine opera at the Festival
Macbeth (Festival Theatre) Dark and deadly
SO opera at the Edinburgh International Festival has come full circle. At the first festival in 1947, Verdi’s Macbeth was the first opera to be performed. Now, to mark the 70th anniversary, it is being performed again.
An inspired choice it is, too. What could be more fitting for the Festival than Shakespeare’s ‘Scottish Play’ set to Verdi’s wonderful music?
Not that it’s the easiest evening you will spend in the theatre. It’s deep and dark and deadly; almost unremitting in its bleakness.
Yet it is a bleakness with a veneer of opulence. Its sheer sense of theatricality makes sure of that. Billed as an Italian ‘melodramma’, it is certainly dramatic – though not at all mellow.
Though the libretto is clearly based on Shakespeare’s play, there are some dramatic differences, such as the handling of the famous witches. There are not three hags but three groups of hags, each ten or a dozen strong. Their initial appearance from beneath a vast, blood-soaked white sheet is horrifying.
From an interview with director Emma Dante, it appears the idea is that the peculiarly fecund witches are constantly impregnated by satyrs to ensure the continuation of their damned species.
It certainly makes for a hugely more impressive scene than three individual witches.
The entrance of Macbeth, sung here by Slovakian baritone Dalibor Jenis, brings more chilling imagery.
King Duncan’s victorious general is certainly mounted on a white steed – or, rather, on the bleached white bones of a skeletal steed. A portent of what is to come every bit as accurate as those of the witches.
Jenis’s performance begins as a fairly low-key affair – but it gathers pace and intensity as the opera unfolds.
Through bouts of ambition, doubt, depression, desperation, despair and death, Macbeth the man crumbles. But Jenis the performer gets better and better as his character disintegrates. By the end, his is as powerful a performance as one could wish for.
Had he only started the opera in more confident mode, he could well have been the equal of the undoubted star of the show – Anna Pirozzi as his wife.
TThe Italian soprano’s performance as the female embodiment of evil was stunning. From first to last, beginning to end, she held the Festival Theatre audience in the palm of her hand. HE production, as indicated, was theatrical in the extreme, clad in bold hues of gold, red, white and black: gold crowns, red robes, white shrouds and black hearts.
The giant gold crowns were both a source of power and a prison for the damned couple. The high golden throne to which Macbeth aspired left him trapped aloft when the smaller thrones were removed.
One of the most emotional scenes came at the beginning of Act Four, when Macduff (Piero Pretti) and his band of exiles on the run from Macbeth’s vengeance lament the pain and suffering in their homeland.
But the agony suffered by the distraught Macduff over the news of the murders of his wife and family somehow transforms as more and more bodies are laid out on stage. As white sheets are draped over them, they remind one of the rows of white gravestones in Flanders fields.
The personal becomes the universal as we recognise this both as a requiem and a rallying call for Scotland to become, as they say, a nation once again. It is a deeply disturbing and profoundly moving scene.
The only jarring note came in the programme, which claimed the scene was set ‘on the borders of Scotland and England, with Birnam Wood in the distance’. It’s a fair old distance from the Border to Birnam.
The end, when it came, was swift, with Macbeth despatched under a theatrical hail of swords.
The entire production was high class, but the orchestra of the Teatro Regio Torino – under an inspired Gianandrea Noseda – was in its element. It may have been based on the Scottish Play, but this was an Italian orchestra, playing Italian music, in its very own Italian style.
Altogether, it was a first-class way to celebrate 70 years of Macbeth at the Festival.