As with the Auckland season, we recently offered another guest blogger the chance to attend Macbeth opening night in Wellington and share their thoughts on the show. Sarah Chesney was our lucky guest, and below is her blog on Wellington's opening night of Macbeth..."A performance to equal last year’s impressive Eugene Onegin is no easy task, but The NBR New Zealand Opera production of Verdi’s Macbeth was fiery from beginning to end.
Michele Kalmandi sings Macbeth superbly, his voice shifting easily from a vivid, full sound to the cupa or hollowness Verdi demands. As Lady Macbeth, Antonia Cifrone is formidable, her second act aria, ‘La luce langue’, captivating and resolute. She sustains a vocal intensity throughout the opera from the brilliance and polish of her bursts of coloratura in the brindisi to the sense of controlled detachment in her mad scene.
The production conveys all of Verdi’s fast-paced dramatic continuity. The three main props – three blasted trees, a bed and a folding screen – are used to good effect, particularly the screen, which successfully differentiates between public and private spaces within the unchanging, shady scenery. Although later in opera some of the dramatic sense is lost when the trees and bed are used together, confounding any distinction between inside and outside. This is especially obvious in Act 4 when the introduction of Lady Macbeth’s sonnambulismo is used to change the scene from Scottish border to bedroom and Lady Macbeth must carefully and sanely pick her way through the branches.
The fantastical element of Macbeth is limited in this production. Rather than prophesising, the witches appear to make ‘educated guesses’, garnering their information from the newspaper scraps they sweep up. The witches are the fundamental dramatic impetus of the opera. Three of them maintain a constant presence on stage, serving as a visible extension of their permeating voice in Verdi’s score. With not a cauldron in sight they sneakily stalk the stage, half-crouched, as cleaners and midwives. In Act 3, they deliver perhaps the descendents of Banquo, who they predicted would father kings in the first act. At the very least, the witches’ mischievous dance, tossing the babies amongst themselves and fashioning them tiny crowns to wear, presents a symbol of life. This scene is contrasted with (but doesn’t completely justify) the superfluous action of the prelude, in which Lady Macbeth suffers a miscarriage.
The performance was punctuated by the gasps of horror from the person sitting beside me. Lady Macbeth enters the stage in a bloodstained dress (gasp). The witches slide back the screen to reveal King Duncan’s murdered body (gasp). The assassins leap from the trees to attack Banquo (gasp). My neighbour’s reaction attests that even if the fantastic is absent, it is offset by the shock of violence, on-stage death and gripping dramatics. However, perhaps director Tim Albery could have followed Verdi’s lead and limited the continuous literal depictions of the characters’ thoughts and visions to Banquo’s ghost and the apparitions. Little is left to the audience’s imagination – or the music – when all is visible on stage.
The banquet scene was particularly brilliant. The chorus developed the unsettling mood, reacting against Macbeth’s flights of madness and Lady Macbeth’s exaggerated attempts at diversion during her brindisi. The only blip in an otherwise sensation performance by the Chapman Tripp chorus was the weak assassins’ chorus – too sotto voce even for Macbeth – which briefly showed an imbalance between singers and orchestra evident in a couple of passages. Overall though, the Vector Wellington orchestra perform admirably under the direction of Guido Ajmone Marsan. The nuances of Verdi’s score were well executed and the interplay between the winds in their solo passages and with the vocal lines was especially notable.
Of the supporting roles, Roman Shulackoff shone as Macduff. His tormented Act 4 aria (‘Ah, la paterna mano’) was memorable for his sustained phrasing and lyricism. Jud Arthur’s Banquo was assured and rich, his entrance as the ghost, wrenching off his bloodied clothes prompted a final gasp from my neighbour. Macbeth ended spectacularly with the original 1847 ending, suitably updated to the production’s Cold War-era staging. It was, by a whisker, my highlight of the performance."
Sarah Chesney, guest blogger
