Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No!: Macbeth at the ROH
Macbeth
The Royal Opera
Royal Opera House
Upper Slips CC14, £17
25 March 2018
ROH page
There are times, rare times, when you just need a good old-fashioned opera diva. That time – with a goofy opera, a dramatically inert leading man and an achingly horrendous production – was now. Anna Netrebko, armed with an improbably towering hairdo that could but amaze and delight, was the diva to save the day.
Netrebko doesn’t always do it for me. I remember her Mimí as marred by lusty acting and super-sharp singing that carried the performance the wrong side of grotesque. But these aren’t worries to trouble Lady Macbeth. The scenery isn’t going to eat itself, after all, and Netrebko looks and sounds like she is having the time of her life: so loud and metallic and zingy, so ferocious and wicked and doomed. She knows what Verdi wanted more than he did.
Netrebko’s entrance was like a bolt of electricity and boy did the performance need it. The female chorus got things off to a bad start, seeming barely to register the tempos Pappano wanted. There was little salvation from Željko Lučić‘s Macbeth; he sounds quite good but looks like nothing so much as a potato on legs, and while it might work on the big screen from up in the slips I need a bit more to go on. Ildebrando D’Arcangelo as Macduff, on the other hand, was on fine form both singing and acting-wise but even his beauty struggles to register against this production.
I’ll sound mean. I’ll believe there are worse Macbeths out there and no doubt I should be grateful for… for… for… Hmm. Well, nevertheless, there are no doubt things for which I should be grateful. But I think the set looks nasty, the samurai costumes look grim, the gilded cage motif makes me shrink with embarrassment, the choreography for the chorus is either absurdly too difficult or woefully under-written, and that they blew the whole budget on golden horsemen seen in one scene for about two minutes, a scene which also never works because it just looks like the dancers in the horses are stressed about not being able to see where they’re going. Oh, it’s vile.
At this point I’d usually sing some praises to the orchestra, but I feel disinclined towards that. Perhaps I’m unfairly prejudiced by the Verdi, which sounds to me as something of a Frankenstein’s monster, a strong nose here, a beautiful wrist there and lots of mismatched skin in between. There are some good bits and they all sounded good. They also all happened to have Netrebko in, or be ‘Patria oppresso’. With one exception! Mr Netrebko, Yusif Eyvazov, stormed on stage to give a truly stonking rendition of ‘Ah, la paterna mano’. He seemed to spend himself on that and was barely audible in everything else, but one triumph is better than none.
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