Verdi - Macbeth

Giuseppe Verdi - Macbeth

NI Opera, Belfast - 2014

Nicholas Chalmers, Oliver Mears, Bruno Caproni, Rachel Nicholls, Paul Carey Jones, Miriam Murphy, Andrew Rees, John Molloy, Aaron Cawley, Doreen Curran, Nathan Morrison, Christopher Cull, Roy Heaybeard, Tom Deazley, Patrick Donnelly

Grand Opera House, Belfast - 21st/22nd February 2014

Although it's commonly known in theatrical circles as "the Scottish play", it's rare that there's much made of the actual setting of Shakespeare's 'Macbeth' in dramatic productions or in Verdi's opera version of the work. The themes of Macbeth go far beyond mere location or historical context to consider the nature of war (usually with troops in modern combat gear), of ambition and social aspirations, and - evidently - the darker side of human nature that is brought out by such matters. You very rarely see or need to consider the question of Scotland itself in either traditional or modern updatings of the work. NI Opera's production of Verdi's early masterwork (a co-production with the Welsh National Opera) however goes right back to core issues at the heart of the work in more ways than one.

Maybe it's because there's considerable attention drawn to all matters Scottish with the country's forthcoming vote on independence, but nationalistic matters and flag-waving were very much in evidence in NI Opera's production of Verdi's Macbeth. The displaying of flags is of course a controversial and unresolved issue in the current Northern Irish political climate and such displays would undoubtedly have a resonance with the local audience, but Oliver Mears, the Artistic Director of NI Opera, manages nonetheless to avoid any overt contemporary references or political commentary on whether Scotland and the UK (or indeed Northern Ireland) are "better together" or not.

That's not to say that NI Opera's director doesn't cleverly exploit the power of such imagery and recognise its significance when one is dealing with questions of power and ambition. When the arrival of Duncan is announced to much pomp, ceremony and nationalistic flag-waving here, you almost expect to see Alex Salmond appear on the stage. It would be tempting also to imagine a version of Nicola Sturgeon as ambitious first-lady in waiting, but Lady Macbeth here has more of an appearance of an Imelda Marcos, wasting little time on her ascension as wife of the newly crowned king to accumulate a couple of large wardrobes for fur coats and shoes.  There's nothing too obvious here, but enough references for an audience to recognise familiar trappings of power, ambition and success.

Beyond all the kilts, sporrans and saltires however, Mears also managed to dredge up other deeper aspects of the work that are perhaps not so commonly explored in either theatrical or opera presentations of Macbeth. In addition to those main themes, which were covered only as well as Verdi and his librettist Frencesco Maira Piave's imperfect interpretation of Shakespeare allow (ie. not terribly effectively), there are however other rich themes to be explored and for Mears, one of those relates to several references to innocence, children and death. Fearing the prediction of the witches, Macbeth's Herod-like fear of Banquo and his son becomes pathological in relation to the future generations that will eventually supplant him from a position that he has taken it into his own (bloody) hands to obtain for himself.

In what is becoming something of a running theme with Mears (the darker side of the children/adult relationship and Death are also evident in Britten's Turn of the Screw, and it's there also in the more disturbing fairytale undercurrents of Humperdinck's Hansel and Gretel, not to mention that another notorious child-murderer, Herod, features in the forthcoming 2014-15 NI Opera production of Strauss' Salome), the director makes much of this theme and references to it in the work. Most evidently here, it's in the novel witches' dismemberment of babies as ingredients for their cauldron (where apparitions in the form of children again make fearful predictions to Macbeth), and it's there also in the procession of baby-faced apparitions of Banquo's line that haunt Macbeth's dreams.

This undoubtedly helped to bring about Macbeth's descent into a murderous and paranoid tyrant in the later acts much more successfully than Verdi and Piave manage, but there's little the production can do about the dramatic failings of the opera in making real the motivations of the greed and dangerous ambition of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. The weakness of the libretto in this respect is compounded by it being performed in English here. Not only does it expose the poor translation of the Shakespearean text when translated back into English, but it also loses what little lyricism the Italian singing brings in its stead. The use of English translations supposedly for accessibility perhaps needs a rethink, since without surtitles it means that you can only actually hear about 50% of what is sung.

None of that however is through any fault of the singing here on the first of only three performances of the production at the Grand Opera House in Belfast. From the moment that she read Macbeth's letter with clear, resonant diction, there was little doubt that Rachel Nicholls had the measure of Lady Macbeth, and it didn't take long for the sheer force and control of her voice to become fully apparent, sailing over over the robust performance of Verdi's dramatic score conducted by Nicholas Chambers. The English language performance however did no-one any favours, 'Daylight is fading', for example, passing by without any of the show-stopping qualities that usually accompany 'La luce langue'.  

Bruno Caproni's Macbeth suffered from the same problem of the weakness of the libretto being exposed by the English back-translation, his 'Mal per me' finale never quite hitting the emotional heights that it achieves in Verdi's original scoring of the work. (The version used here a well-judged blend of the best of the 1847 and 1865 versions). Caproni wasn't able to make much of the dramatic content either, his acting being mostly confined to being in a perpetual state of stupefaction at the eerie apparitions leading to events spinning out of his control. In terms of singing however, he was everything that the role required, commanding and in perfect control. Alongside Rachel Nicholl's impressive Lady Macbeth, this was casting as good as you could hope for in these great Verdi roles. The alternate cast of Paul Carey Jones and Miriam Murphy also performed capably, but without managing to bring any greater edge of wild danger to the Macbeth/Lady Macbeth partnership.

The specific challenges of singing Verdi were revealed in the difficulty that John Molloy had with the delivery of Banquo. Molloy, so fleet and flitting as Dulcamara in L'Elisir d'Amore earlier this season, couldn't quite sustain the rather more difficult dramatic Verdi line. Andrew Rees, on the other hand, really entered into the spirit of the Verdian melodrama as Macduff. It was this kind of melodrama that you realised was missing from the Nicholas Chalmers' conducting of the Ulster Orchestra. The beauty of Verdi's wonderful melodies was all there, but it lacked the unrestrained drive and force that the work really needs to make its full impact.  Early Verdi doesn't require this much subtlety.

The chorus of NI Opera were on form throughout. As elsewhere, 'Patria Oppressa' might have lost something in translation, but it was superbly staged and sung. One of Mears' more clever touches was to cast the witches into three groups of composite forms, a trick that worked marvellously, the witches creating the kind of eeriness and menace when they were onstage that should also have been there but wasn't in the dagger apparition and the sleepwalking scenes. Even in woollen bobble hats and bomber jackets, the male chorus also exuded menace where required, particularly in the killing of Banquo scene. Whether it's true or not in terms of the Scottish question, "Better Together" can certainly at least be applied to the joint effort of this NI Opera and the Welsh National Opera production of Macbeth.

Wagner - The Flying Dutchman

Richard Wagner - The Flying Dutchman

NI Opera, 2013

Nicholas Chalmers, Oliver Mears, Bruno Caproni, Giselle Allen, Stephen Richardson, Paul McNamara, Adrian Dwyer, Doreen Curran

Grand Opera House, Belfast, 15th & 17th February 2013


The outcome was never really in doubt.  NI Opera's award-winning track record has been impressive since their inception two years ago, the scale and calibre of the works presented increasingly ambitious, from Menotti's The Medium and Puccini's site-specific Tosca in Derry through to newly commissioned work for NI Opera Shorts and a production of Noye's Fludde that travelled to Beijing.  Putting on a Wagner opera however is a challenge on another scale entirely.  Even if Der Fliegende Holländer is one of the composer's shorter works, it is scarcely any less demanding in the very specific orchestral and singing requirements that are quite different from the popular aria-driven Italian opera.

Admittedly however, while the First Act of the English language version of The Flying Dutchman was capably performed here at the Grand Opera House in Belfast - the first ever fully-staged performance of the work in Northern Ireland - it did feel a little flat.  Something was missing.  Still, no cause for immediate concern.  The First Act of The Flying Dutchman is quite difficult, the stormy overture a prelude to a gloom-laden hour of long passages of deep, grave male singing - mostly basses and baritones - as the dark figure of the Dutchman recounts the horror of his curse, doomed to sail the seas for eternity, finding land again after seven years in the vain hope that the love of a good and faithful woman will set him free.  There's not a whole lot of light and shade here, much less dramatic action and, even with the familiarity now of Wagner's brilliant leitmotifs and their hints of what is to come, it's always been a fairly demanding opening sequence.

Like much of Wagner though you just have to bear with it, as the forthcoming rewards more often than not merit the long drawn-out pacing and slow development of situations.  (And yes, I realise that this review seems to be adopting the same principle - long-windedly positing doom and gloom with the promise of redemption to come).  That's because Wagner has a secret weapon in reserve for the Second Act, which is the arrival of Senta.  It's a device that Wagner would unleash in a more fluid manner in the revised version of the opera - played straight through with linking sections and no breaks between acts - but if you listen carefully she's there in a leitmotif during the Vorspiel to Act One.  Recognising this, NI Opera's production did indeed effectively and with musical validity try to lift the First Act by bringing forward Senta's first appearance to the dreamily melancholic Senta leitmotif in the overture, the young woman walking across a stormy shoreline as the snow starts to fall.  And it even sounded to me like conductor Nicholas Chalmers wrung an extra ounce of romantic sensitivity out of the Ulster Orchestra during this sequence.  Despite the dramatic shortcomings then and musical unevenness of the weighty first Act (Daland and the Dutchman's duet sounding like something that has wandered in from an Italian opera) with a staging was unable to give it any kind of boost, this nonetheless boded promisingly for what was to come.

We had to wait until after the interval then for the deployment of Wagner's incendiary device, but NI Opera clearly also had one or two secret weapons of their own in their armoury to ensure that this Dutchman took flight.  One was the remarkable performance of Giselle Allen as Senta, the other was the energetic drive and virtuosity of the Ulster Orchestra.  OK, nothing there that will really come as any great surprise to those of us familiar with the qualities Northern Ireland's finest, but the way they were brought into play was impressive nonetheless.  You could virtually hear a sigh of relief from the audience as the curtain lifted on what looked like a church assembly hall in the 1970s - a bright, colourful scene-shift from the gloom of Act One - where the ladies sat spinning at their Singer sewing machines, the beauty of the assembled female voices soaring with optimism and hope that the sea would deliver the safe return of their men.

Doreen Curran's glowering Mary wonderfully kept the proceedings from getting too cheery, but it was of course the ringing tones of Giselle Allen's Senta whose romantic spinning of the tale of the cursed captain and his crew dominated and directed the whole tone of the Second Act.  Responding to the urgings of her fellow seamstresses, this Senta did indeed seem to be possessed by a demon, sitting down and seeming to slip into a trance as she recounted the myth of the Flying Dutchman.  Much as Chalmers managed to place some emphasis on the Vorspiel's dreamy Senta leitmotif, stage director Oliver Mears similarly allowed Senta's romanticism to invade the whole work whenever she was present, allowing the necessary spell to be woven that would make the Dutchman's arrival - and the long silent gaze that lies between them - all the more dramatic.  Retaking the same positions into this locked gaze after their duet, it was as if the romanticism of the encounter takes place in more in Senta's head than in reality.

Dramatically then, as well as in the all-important delivery of the exceptional singing demands that are necessary to make this work convincingly, NI Opera's The Flying Dutchman succeeded at least in finding the right tone.  It even allowed for one or two moments of humour to sit well alongside all the weighty recounting of ancient legends, such as Senta's father Daland approving of the couple making each other's acquaintance while they are in the middle of a hot-and-heavy, passionate, sweeping-everything-off-the-table kind of entanglement on the nearest available substitute for a bed.  Quite why the setting of the seventies was chosen however wasn't entirely clear.  There didn't appear to be any real attempt to connect the legend of the Dutchman to the Troubles, even if there is a certain amount of recognition of Belfast's history as a port and ship-building city.  There's no obligation of course for NI Opera to make every local production site-specific, and attempting to do so with Wagner could lead to some ill-advised and ill-fitting parallels that would never work convincingly (Senta a militant activist waiting for the delivery of an arms shipment?  The homeless "Dutchman" seeking to rid himself of the curse of his nation's occupation?), so perhaps allowing the work to speak for itself in the 70s is enough.  It certainly worked on those terms alone.

Well, not quite alone.  Both the male and the female choruses were in wonderful voice and with the driving accompaniment of the orchestra, their powerful contribution to the impact of the overall work was well directed and delivered.  Crucially however there were also solid performances from the main roles in Bruno Caproni's brooding Dutchman and Giselle Allen's obsessive Senta.  The Belfast soprano sustained a magnificent tension right the second act and the close of the third, a veritable Senta-bomb that exploded on the stage of the Grand Opera House in a blood-drenched death scene climax of nerve-shattering high notes.  If my own reaction is anything to go by, the audience were surely gasping for breath by that point.  If you can't achieve that kind of impact doing Wagner though, there's really no point even attempting it, but when you have Giselle Allen and the Ulster Orchestra at your disposal and operating on the kind of form shown here, there was never likely to be any serious concern about the outcome.