Giuseppe Verdi's "Macbeth," the first of his three great Shakespeare operas, was an enormous success when new (1847) but fell out of fashion for the better part of a century. Its rejuvenation in the 1950s was the co-product of symphony-class conductors and powerhouse sopranos (Maria Callas only one of them) in the role of Lady Macbeth.
The new production of "Macbeth" at the 2023 Salzburg Festival had both, warranting a video (Unitel Editions) likely to divide audiences but sure to please lovers of opera as drama.
When Franz Welser-Möst withdrew from the production for health reasons, the baton was caught by a dream successor, out conductor Philippe Jordan. The match of any other "Macbeth" conductor in our time, Jordan leads a performance so theatrical and vivid that its silences speak as loudly as it sounds.
Ineluctably propulsive and sinister to its corners, Jordan packs his reading of the score with skittering, acidic, strings, eerie, weeping winds, and disconcerted and disconcerting brass. But its genius is in its masterful pacing, foreshadowing the play's horror and depravity from the start and then leading it to its subsequent and final blood-stained tragedy. There is as much dark magic in the pit as onstage.
But then...
The production is by Krysztof Warlikowski, one of the leading directors of opera in Europe, guaranteed to raise controversies galore. True confession: I've so hated Warlikowski's work until recently (the 2021 Munich "Tristan," to be precise) that I've passed on seeing operas I love when he is in charge, adding and subtracting sometimes pivotal elements and generally indulging the sensational as the primary instrument of meaning.
It remains to be seen whether this Salzburg "Macbeth" newly mints me as a True Believer, but I barely exhaled through the opera's four acts by dint of being completely absorbed in the drama. The ever-fading purist in me surrendered to the stage, almost eagerly letting go of bygone principles such as the putative wrong-headedness of inserting people or distracting business that are not in the libretto. You go with his "Macbeth" or you don't, and I went —and often found myself thinking it was a production Verdi would have applauded.
As always, I could use the rest of my available space recounting Warlikowski's interventions, and the temptation to do so is nearly irresistible. But without having to work at it, I found myself marveling at the through-lines of his interpretation, the very word interpretation mild in context, and the dramatic achievement they together underwrote.
To judge by the flapper hair-dos and Art Deco designs, the action is updated to the 1920s or -30s, with a few anachronisms thrown in for good or for ill, but generally adding theatrical spice. Signature Warlikowski touches augment instead of desecrating the proceedings.
Warlikowski has a near fetish for the free-standing but fully operational sink, and I sank when I first saw Lady Macbeth burning her husband (Vladislav Sulimsky)'s letter in the waiting porcelain. But somehow the inevitability of its deployment in the Lady's futile hand-washing scene (Shakespeare's "out, out, damned spot") somehow justifies the other occasions that it is rolled out onto the stage.
Before long, I was captivated by the Warlikowski thumbprints, if only in exchange for his manifest willingness to forgo using cartoon animals in central scenes. By the time the Lady makes her mad-scene entrance, purportedly carrying her bedside lamp, I was delighted that Asmik Gregorian came onstage holding a gooseneck desk lamp that cast a bright, horrid light on Shakespeare' blood-soaked action.
Such touches are innumerable but to a remarkable degree support the opera's big themes, more likely to be minimized if not altogether passed over in more traditional stagings. Children —unborn children, murdered children, and others regarded as threats to the Macbeths' hegemony— hold sway over this production.
Barely has the opera begun before Lady Macbeth, visiting the doctor we find in Shakespeare, has the infertility that torments her confirmed. The production makes telling use of videos superimposed on the stage picture, and Gregorian's tearful endurance of the damning diagnosis follows the black-and-white video enactment of her squirming on the exam table, its stirrups planted forebodingly.
Not kid-friendly
Warlikowski doesn't litter the stage with packs of kids not specified in Shakespeare, but the many we do see tug at our alarmed hearts. Arguably, the director goes too far in having the Lady presage her own murder of the threatening youngsters by poisoning bleachers of them, their bodies lined up at the lip of the stage once the killing is over.
But then there are touches of genius. Banco (the wooly-voiced Tareq Nazmi) is the first to fall, but the son whose violent death he spares reappears to haunt the mad Macbeth in the guise of a half-dozen adolescent actors wearing outsized heads resembling Banco's. When they take Macbeth's place at the banquet table, his fright is as convincing as it is patent.
Dolls litter the scene. At that banquet, the Macbeths' housekeeper —the curly-gray-haired Grisha Martirosyn a dead ringer "The Golden Girls" Sophia, whose frequent interventions provide black-comedy relief throughout the production— lifts the lid on the presenting silver platter to reveal a dead-child doll ringed by cooked apples.
She also operates a girl doll run through with knitting needles a la St. Sebastian, who becomes a minor if deeply disturbing character. But Salzurg's child actors are a brilliant lot, tugging at our hearts while rehearsing our own mad scenes, none of them now gratuitous presences.
What's going on here?
The Macbeths are hair-raisingly good. The "find" of this production is Vladislav Solimsky, whose lacerating baritone is so secure he plays with it, breaking the rules of good singing by scooping up and down the notes in his own mad scenes and turning pivotal notes into snarls and barks. The production powerfully underscores the way in which the king's own murderous impulses take over for his scheming wife's.
Gregorian confirms her reputation as today's leading singing actor. She sports a different dress in each act (wonderful costumes by Malgorzata Szczesniak). In the first she changes downstage in front of us and subsequently manages all the business Warlikowski assigns her masterfully, with no disruption of the vocal line. She hasn't made her mark previously in the coloratura repertoire, but here she delivers it as if to the manner born.
She looks so different in the succeeding acts that her appearance reflects her own disintegrating person. When she and Macbeth wave to the public at the new king's coronation, she's the spitting image of Nancy Reagan, and with her hair up in extravagant curls for the celebratory banquet, she's a lookalike for mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato, purveyor of her own stage magic.
Also, Figaro
Unitel has simultaneously released a video of the Salzburg 2023 Mozart "Le Nozze di Figaro," hewing to the modern view of Mozartian comedy as no laughing matter. With an ideal cast led by conductor Raphaël Pichon, it's the "Figaro" some of us have waited a lifetime for.
Giuseppe Verdi, "Macbeth," 2023 Salzburg Festival, Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra and associated musicians, Philippe Jordan, conductor, Krsystof Warlikowski, director, Unitel Editions. www.unitel.de
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, "Le Nozze di Figaro," 2023 Salzburg Festival, Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra and associated musicians, Raphaël Pichon, conductor, Martin Kusej, director. www.unitel.de
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