There are plenty of differences between Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” and Verdi’s opera of the same name — like, why settle for just three witches when you can have an entire chorus of them? — yet perhaps the most telling is the increased vividness of Lady Macbeth.
Not that she isn’t a key figure in the original — there’s a reason why Lady M. has become a watchword for overweening ambition — but Verdi’s version adds an extra dimension of vocal fury. To hear a soprano unleashing that famously daunting music, with all its high-flown intensity and craggy melodic leaps, is to understand in your bones what it means to be willing to stop at nothing in the quest for power.
That was the trick pulled off by Christina Major on Sunday afternoon, Feb. 16, at the heart of West Bay Opera’s excellent production of “Macbeth.” The second installment of the company’s three-part all-Verdi season, presented at the Lucie Stern Theatre in Palo Alto, was an all-round splendid affair, featuring traditional but inventive staging, fine orchestral work and a first-rate cast headed by baritone Krassen Karagiozov in the title role.
Yet it was Major’s singing, even more than the grim subject matter or the sepulchral lighting scheme or the spooky plunges into the netherworld of the witches, that made a listener’s skin tingle with shivers of awestruck delight. This was not a woman you would ever make the mistake of turning your back to unguarded.
Major made that quality evident primarily through vocal means, with a powerful array of big but finely honed melodic phrases and specific interpretive choices. She brought a ferocious impatience to the Act 1 aria “Vieni, t’affretta,” in which she anticipates Macbeth’s arrival home so they can get the gears of their ambition oiled up and set into motion.
The Act 2 drinking song that heralds the dinner interrupted by Banquo’s ghost sounded festive but ominous, and the final sleepwalking scene was a tour de force of anguish and guilt. Best of all, there seemed to be nothing Verdi threw at her — from full-voice high notes to glittering roulades to deep dives into her lower register — that Major couldn’t handle with precision and aplomb.
She had a capable partner in Karagiozov, one who brought darkly gleaming tone and a robust presence to the role. Macbeth’s combination of fortitude and doubt came through repeatedly, especially in the final aria, which Karagiozov delivered with finely rendered artistry.
Compared with other Italian operas of the period, “Macbeth” is a welter of secondary and ancillary characters (Shakespeare will do that), and West Bay’s large cast contained no weak links. Bass-baritone Benjamin Brady was a particular standout as a stentorian, rich-toned Banquo, and there were winning contributions as well from tenor Dane Suarez as Macduff, tenor Jackson Beaman as Malcolm and boy soprano Jinjia Liu, who made his one passage as a ghostly apparition resound beautifully.
West Bay’s commitment to traditional staging meant a certain amount of stand-and-sing, but that didn’t keep director Ragnar Conde from conjuring up the drama in arresting theatrical colors, or choreographer Kara Davis from creating a panoply of intriguing stage pictures in the long witches’ ballet of Act 3.
Presiding over the whole affair was conductor and company director José Luis Moscovich, who demonstrated yet again how much is possible with commitment and determination. That’s a story of fearless ambition with a much happier ending than “Macbeth.”
“Macbeth”: West Bay Opera. 8 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 22. 2 p.m. Sunday, Feb. 23. $35-$92. Lucie Stern Theatre, 1305 Middlefield Road, Palo Alto. 650-424-9999. www.westbayopera.org