New York Classical Review

The Metropolitan Opera’s “The Voice Matters” slogan appears on a banner emblazoned across a photo of Yannick Nézet-Séguin as one approached Lincoln Center Tuesday night. The evening’s season-opening performance of Verdi’s Macbeth made good on that promise.

Louisa Proske made a remarkable leap from running an indie opera company on a shoestring to directing at the Met, after four years at Oper Halle in Germany. Best known to New York audiences as co-founder of Heartbeat Opera, a wellspring of operatic creativity, Proske had less than a year to mount the production after the original director, Bartlett Sher, withdrew to direct DOLLY: A True Original Musical, based on the lifeof Dolly Parton.

For those familiar with Proske’s work, it is no surprise that she remains faithful to the plot, if not the period. Elizabethan and Jacobean visual references, especially Montana Levi Blanco’s sumptuous costumes, place the action roughly 550 years after Shakespeare’s medieval setting. Jon Bausor uses the Met’s revolving stage to create a seamless progression of scenes viewed through a hole blasted through a massive wall. The castle’s bedchamber, with its imposing bed, is appropriately grand. Otherwise, the staging depicts a modern landscape of war and devastation, which is as close as Proske gets to a unified concept.

Verdi made the supernatural and grotesque much more prominent in the opera than in the play, with the witches becoming a recurring chorus. Proske runs with that idea, creating a core group of 12 witches, augmented at times by dancers and female chorus members. They not only prophesy but act as protagonists, watching the action from various vantage points, at times peering over the walls. One gets the impression that the Macbeths live in a fishbowl under the witches’ constant surveillance.

The coven almost overpowers Macbeth in Act III. The prophecy that no man “born of woman” would harm him was especially vivid: a bloody baby boy wearing a gold crown emerged from an enormously pregnant woman, who, fortunately had her back to the audience. The crowned boy bearing a golden tree, telling Macbeth he will be safe until Birnam Wood moves to Dunsinane, was much subtler and more effective.

Even more visceral was the enormous boar tossed onto the table during the banquet. The horror was heightened when it was transformed into Banquo’s bloody corpse, wreaking havoc on Macbeth’s psyche. The sequence ends with three witches gently tossing red flower petals onto the scene below.

Jorrell Lawyer-Jefferson’s choreography for the men had the precision, athleticism, and angularity of the Bulgarian Quidditch team in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. Sparks flew from swords as soldiers faced off in fights directed by Ran Arthur Braun. The dances were slightly incongruous, but, like the sword fights, they proved exciting.

Quinn Kelsey and Lise Davidsen are relatively new to their respective roles, although they had the benefit of appearing together in concert earlier this year with the Royal Danish Opera. Their Met role debuts are career-defining for both artists, confirming Kelsey as one of the preeminent Verdi baritones of his generation. 

Kelsey began tentatively, vocally and dramatically, clearly marching to his wife’s orders. The equivocation was short-lived. His voice blazed in “Fuggi, regal fantasima,” an outburst of terror, guilt and defiance at the sight of Banquo’s ghost. In Macbeth’s great Act IV aria, Kelsey was no longer a swaggering tyrant but plumbed the depths of despair as he reflected that he had earned neither pity nor respect, let alone the love of his people. The sheer ease of his vocal production was itself a marvel.

For Davidsen, her Lady Macbeth was undoubtedly the finest work she has done at the Met. Davidsen commanded the stage, not only through the impressive size of her voice but through her carefully crafted characterization. There may be a Nordic coolness to this Lady Macbeth, but she exuded confidence, looking spectacular in Blanco’s period gowns. 

Despite the role’s extremes of range, much of it inhabits the middle register, which revealed the ever more complex textures and captivating colors of her voice. The Brindisi sparkled with brilliant, agile coloratura, contrasting with Lady Macbeth’s darker, more declamatory music elsewhere. The Sleepwalking Scene moved from hushed, fragmented middle-register phrases to an anguished high D-flat, marked by the ease of the ascent and its shimmering softness rather than a blast of sound.

Ryan Speedo Green was disappointingly introspective as Banquo, though the dark, lyrical qualities of his superb bass expressed the man’s humanity and paternal tenderness.

Freddie De Tommaso’s forthright Macduff was the exact opposite. It was all the more impressive that the opening of his Act IV aria seemed to come from a disembodied voice, as the tenor was just one of many bodies lying on the stage. The grief-stricken lyricism was short-lived, as De Tommaso took center stage and vowed revenge in torrents of sound. 

Jonathan Burton, in his Met debut, brought substantial vocal weight and charisma to the relatively small role of Malcolm.

Nézet-Séguin led a richly detailed, passion-fueled account of the score. For an opening-night performance, the coordination between pit and stage was exceptional, as was the balance. Nézet-Séguin glories in the full sound of an orchestra, but here his sensitivity to dynamics was exemplary. Kelsey and Davidsen were able to practically whisper at times, due to the conductor’s ability to reduce the orchestral sound to a mere shimmer. The brass were at their most potent at the end of the Banquet Scene, when Macbeth sees Banquo’s ghost.

The Met Chorus was magnificent from the start, expressing Scotland’s suffering under Macbeth’s rule with dark, mournful sounds and emotional power. As the witches, the women of the chorus delighted with their rhythmic precision and gleeful, sinister capers. The great Act IV “Patria oppressa” was the performance’s emotional high point, its intensity of feeling and sorrow expressed through sound. The final, ringing shouts of “Vittoria!” brought the opera to a triumphant end.

Macbeth runs through October 20, with Rafael Davila singing Macduff on October 3. metopera.org