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Verdi’s musical resources in Macbeth are not, in large part, any more sophisticated than they had been in his earlier operas, though naturally the music that he added for the revision, 18 years after the first version, is less formulaic: but the opera is almost seamless, and if you didn’t know it was revised there is very little that would make you suspicious. What, nonetheless, he achieves is an idiom that allows great singing actors to fill their roles with a charge of meaning that lifts the action on to a far higher plane than anything in the operas that precede it. And great singing actors are just what he has at the Royal Opera.
Simon Keenlyside, not exactly typecast as Macbeth, gives one of the performances of a lifetime. His voice seems to have grown several sizes, and since he also sings extraordinarily effective pianissimi, he has the means at his disposal to create a complex character who can exult, rage, hesitate, despair, defy, all by vocal means. But since Keenlyside is also a fine actor, the figure he presents us with is of appalling pathos. And he performs the most spectacular death fall seen at Covent Garden since Boris Christoff last sang Boris Godunov there — and with a broken arm.
Keenlyside is fully matched by Liudmyla Monastyrska as ‘the Lady’, as Verdi always called her. She wasn’t impressive as Aida a couple of months ago, but here she is a different artist. She reads Macbeth’s letter uncommonly well, and vaults into her stupendous first aria with enormous panache. She makes, as a singer must, the brindisi that Lady Macbeth sings to divert the guests’ attention from Macbeth’s outburst at seeing Banquo’s ghost a painful, indeed tragic but heroic effort. And her last solo is eerie, heartrending. I’d have welcomed a less indeterminate relationship between the married pair — they seem to avoid kissing.
The rest of the cast are all up to their standard, with an impressive Banquo from Raymond Aceto. And, vitally, that somehow the miserable production of Phyllida Lloyd, and the unhelpful sets of Anthony Ward, subtract far less from the impact than one would expect. Even so, it is time that they were retired and replaced by something that didn’t require virtually superhuman commitment and capacities to overcome them.
Handelians were offered a feast at the Barbican, with a concert performance of Ariodante, a starry cast headed by Joyce DiDonato in the title role. Though it must be alarming for an artist to arouse expectations as high as she does, she coped with every aspect of the part with aplomb. Her great lament ‘Scherza infida’ could not have been more passionate — or possibly it could, if the conductor Alan Curtis had kept it a bit tighter. Her final giddy aria of joy was a display of coloratura which no one who witnessed it will ever forget. She had a marvellous partner, too, in Karina Gauvin as Ginevra, who for me has the most moving music in the whole enormous opera.
All seven soloists impressed, though I had doubts about the Polinesso of Marie-Nicole Lemieux. She made the villain so enthusiastically vile as to turn the role — and thus the opera — into something of a giggle, and that disturbs the balance of what is surely a serious, anxious piece. Lemieux showed that she could sing unhammily too, so it’s a pity that she had these lapses of taste.
Overall I felt a lack of drive in the conducting, but that may be just because, try as I might, and quite often, I can’t fully enter into the Handelian operatic mode. Even so, it was at the least an evening of many beauties.
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Also by Michael Tanner
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