Boston Lyric Updates Macbeth
Production Set in a Timeless Nowhere/ Everywhere
By: David Bonetti - Nov 07, 2011
Macbeth
Music by Giuseppe Verdi
Libretto by Francesco Maria Piave and Andrea Maffei after the text by Shakespeare
Boston Lyric Opera
Shubert Theatre, Nov. 4, 6, 9, 11, 13
Production Team:
Conductor: David Angus
Stage Director: David Schweizer
Set Designer: John Conklin
Costume Designer: Nancy Leary
Lighting Designer: Robert Wierzel
Boston Lyric Opera Chorus Master: Michelle Alexander
Cast:
Macbeth: Daniel Sutin
Lady Macbeth: Carter Scott
Banquo: Darren K. Stokes
Macduff: Richard Crawley
Malcolm: John Irvin
Duncan: Domenico Mastrototoro
With Verdi’s Macbeth, the first outing of its 2011/2012 season, Boston Lyric Opera can chalk up a success if not a triumph. There are too many inadequacies, vocally and conceptually, for that. But the fact that the production holds the stage and moves swiftly and inexorably to its preordained conclusion, the dictator at the end strung up on meat hooks, echoing the death of tyrants of every age – think Mussolini, Saddam Hussein and Qaddafi – makes the evening a riveting experience.
The production echoes Boston Lyric’s brilliant conception last year of Viktor Ullmann’s The Emperor of Atlantis (Or Death Quits). (Stage director David Schweitzer and costume designer Nancy Leary return from that little-seen triumph – its short run played during a blizzard and its aftermath.) The style is Expressionist, which is appropriate for the timeless story of a power-hungry couple, the husband weak and conflicted, the wife single-minded and amoral, who pave their way to the top with blood and then fall in similar abattoir style. The approach isn't new, but it works.
Here, in John Conklin’s set, which is recycled an updated from an old New York City Opera production, we are in a non-specific place – a raked stage, scaffolding to the sides used as balconies and a staircase to nowhere in the rear. Large metallic grids descend as needed at an unsettling angle. There is no reference to Scotland, no kilts, no scent of haggis or of the heath. We are in some post-catastrophe nowhere/everywhere.
The major innovation is for the witches. Taking Verdi’s own comment that the opera has three characters, Macbeth, his Lady and the witches, the production team expanded the witches’ role from the two explicit scenes where they prophesize Macbeth’s rise and fall to include all subsidiary characters – servants, courtiers, hangers-on - who remain on stage in nearly every scene. Leary has given the witches a modern primitive look. Dressed in rags and marked with facial tattoos that look vaguely Maori, they crowd the stage threatening to overtake the principals and swallow up the production. When Macbeth and his wife first appear among them in a halo of light – Robert Wierzel’s lighting design is highly effective throughout – he, a modern generalissimo, she his moll in a tight-fitting lavender gown, the visual effect is electric.
Wierzel’s great moment is in the banquet scene in which Banquo’s ghost appears to Macbeth in the midst of the festivities exuberantly overseen by his wife on the occasion of his (their) accession to the throne. Macbeth is the only one who sees Banquo, whom he has just had murdered. Wierzel, who has installed a set of garish yellow lights below the raised stage, giving the forced festivities sickly party tones, quickly shuts them off as the ghost appears, bathing the stage in a cold, bluish light that focuses attention on the interaction of Macbeth and Banquo, while the partiers freeze in the shadows. A chilling, brilliant coup de theatre.
The production conception falls apart, unfortunately, in the Act II scene of Macbeth’s final meeting with the witches. As they reveal their prophecies, one after another – he has nothing to fear of man born of woman, he has nothing to fear until he sees Birnam Wood advance, etc. – the use of puppets, more Bread and Puppet Theater than Julie Taymor, which have played a significant role throughout the production, prove distracting. The loss of energy at this point deflates the opera’s final scenes, including the work’s greatest single moment, Lady Macbeth’s sleeping walking scene – the “Out, out, damned spot” moment – which Verdi has brilliantly composed in a nod to the bel canto “mad scene” tradition. (And what about Macbeth stabbing his wife? Doesn’t he hear about her off-stage murder from a messenger?)
A momentary detour to a more general subject: Verdi and Shakespeare. Verdi esteemed Shakespeare above all other playwrights. He based his two final works, two of the greatest masterpieces of the operatic literature, Otello and Falstaff, on Shakespeare, and you can reasonably say that he improved both. Many will argue that point over the former, but few will waste their time doing so on the latter. No one would argue the same over Macbeth, which was his first attempt to adapt the bard to the lyric stage. (He also wrote of a desire to set King Lear. He didn’t, which all opera fans regret. Think of the arias for Lear!)
Why the affection? Shakespeare was a humanist. His plays are about people – the noble and the abject, scoundrels and heroes, victims and oppressors, losers and winners, the full repertory of life. So was Verdi. His affinity with Shakespeare is no great mystery. Theirs are two sensibilities that connect across centuries.
Verdi is not the only opera composer who has used Shakespeare as a source. Already this season we have heard Opera Boston’s Beatrice et Benedict, which Hector Berlioz based on Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, and last season we heard Lyric Opera’s version of Benjamin Britten’s Midsummer’s Night Dream. Upcoming is Opera Boston’s Capuletti ed i Montecchi, in which Vincenzo Bellini retold the Romeo and Juliet story (although from the sources Shakespeare also used). All this in just in two seasons!
Still, Verdi had a focused and repeated attraction to Shakespeare, and one could argue that in his loftiest works that were not based on Shakespearean sources – Don Carlos, Simon Boccanegra, even Aida - he had Shakespeare in the back of his mind.
As well as being a great humanist dramatist, Verdi was, of course, a great composer, writing arias, ensembles and choruses that touch the soul and mind in equal measure. To be fully effective, his works require soloists and ensembles that equal his dramatic intensity. Although the orchestra, led by David Angus, and the chorus, led by Michelle Alexander, were more than up to the task, providing precise, often thrilling moments, the soloists, with one exception, were less than stellar.
As Macbeth, baritone Daniel Sutin was acceptable. A good actor, he was able to convey both Macbeth’s drive to power, abetted by his wife, and his doubt about the heinous acts he has to commit. The voice was serviceable, but there were no thrills.
The thrills, of course, are supposed to be provided by Lady Macbeth, 11th century Scotland’s dragon lady, for whom Verdi wrote the opera’s two most riveting arias, the first act Vieni, t’affretta, the soliloquy in which she invokes the gods to unsex her so she can focus without scruple on the task at hand, and the last act Una macchia e qui tuttora, the famous “sleep walking” scene, in which she finally expresses a touch of guilt over her behavior. (“Out, out, damn spot,” in English.)
Carter Scott, the Lady Macbeth of the evening, was a mixed blessing. A full-figured woman, she physically commanded the stage, whether wearing the couture of a woman of her rank or in the pearly white negligee of her midnight sleeping-walking scene. She acted up as storm. When the text called on her to be ruthless, she was; when it required her to be the party hostess from Hell - who wants the ghost of the man her husband has just murdered to show up at his inauguration banquet, uninvited and unannounced? - she mustered the requisite, if forced, joie de vivre.
Vocally, however, Scott was not ideal for the role. Her voice lacked the steely allure a Lady Macbeth should command. Although her low and middle voices were acceptable, her high notes dissolved into shrieks that unfortunately recalled Renata Scotto, who sang the role in Boston with the Metropolitan Opera in her declining years. (Not that Scott is to be confused with Scotto, an often great singer.) More problematic was the direction Scott received in the “sleeping walking” scene, which looked like a college dance program’s idea of modern dance. Scott was game – give her credit for that.
Darren K. Stokes, as Banquo, was a commanding presence and sang powerfully in his aria.
Richard Crawley, who sang the nobleman Macduff, stole the evening. Alas, he had only one aria in the second act in which he laments the slaughter of his family at the command of the increasingly monstrous Macbeth and his resolve to see him overthrown. Crawley’s singing was clear and brilliant with an Italianate ping that grabs at the heart of the listener. His one brief moment made you realize how lacking the rest of the evening’s solo singing was.
POSTSCRIPT:
Saturday night Philippe Jaroussky, the phenomenal French countertenor, sang arias by Handel and Vivaldi with Apollo’s Fire, a crack early music band from Cleveland, under the auspices of the Boston Early Music Festival. To say that Jaroussky brought down the house is an understatement. Emmanuel Church was filled to the rafters, which shook with the noise the audience made at the conclusion of the program.
Jaroussky, who was born in 1978, sings with an unearthly purity and sweetness of tone. He has a charming stage manner and engages with the meaning and drama inherent in each aria. As he spun out unaccompanied lines you felt that you were hearing an angel sing. Comparing high-voiced singers to angels is a cliché that is beyond tired, but it was more than apt in this case. Of course, angels don’t exist, but Philippe Jaroussky does, and he sang in Boston Saturday night. Lucky those who were there to hear him!