Macbeth; The Rite of Spring review – from Dunsinane to Peckham

Macbeth’s horse is a skeleton on wheels, chalk-white and bionic. His wife sleepwalks across a squad of automated hospital beds, sheets bloodied. Birnam Wood is no green forest but a cluster of prickly pears from a hot, dry land not obviously on the road to Dunsinane. Verdi’s Macbeth was the first opera performed at the Edinburgh international festival in 1947, if not quite like this. It’s back for the festival’s 70th anniversary in a new staging by the Sicilian director, writer and actor Emma Dante, performed by the Teatro Regio Torino as part of the company’s two-opera residency (La bohème is being staged this weekend).

Heavy with symbolism, including a head-banging corps of twerking witches impregnated by tumbling satyrs and a murdered Duncan portrayed as the dead Christ, it may be tortuous. True, the fan-like gold crowns dangling from on high, each constructed from 19 splayed spears, do look like sunrise bedheads. Yet the action, on a near-empty stage, manages to be potent and direct, thanks chiefly to the musical wizardry of Gianandrea Noseda.

There was some doubt that the Italian maestro, an incomparable Verdi conductor, would recover from an emergency back operation in time for this Edinburgh stint. Fortunately he did. Despite some stiffness when he took his bow, this most acrobatic of artists drew exciting vigour and intensity from soloists, chorus and orchestra.

By mixing the 1847 original with the 1865 revision, Noseda maximises the dramatic and musical impact. You win and lose, as in most operas with more than one version, but this Turin staging – a co-production with Palermo and Macerata – was alive with conviction. Verdi’s 10th opera and his first Shakespeare has no let-up. Otello and Falstaff, longer-breathed operas in form and structure, would follow much later. This early-period work is blunt, episodic, awkward in the libretto by Francesco Maria Piave (with additions by Andrea Maffei), but full of force and dark, turbulent energy.

The Slovak baritone Dalibor Jenis had the right vocal beauty and brawn for the title role but never left any doubt that Anna Pirozzi’s Lady Macbeth was in charge. The Neapolitan soprano, who will share the role with Anna Netrebko at Covent Garden next spring, combines accuracy with steely, rasping ferocity as the role demands. Banquo (Marko Mimica) led a robust supporting ensemble, all rising to their moments in the spotlight, notably Macduff (Piero Pretti) in his lament for his dead wife and children. The chorus of Scottish exiles, staged in darkness with faces scarcely visible, sang that great cry for liberation, Patria oppressa, with absolute precision and, after a whispered start, all the force they could muster.

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Verdi tends to get a critical drubbing for Macbeth: too melodramatic, too rough-hewn and unsubtle. At his first attempt he still hadn’t yet written those two landmark works Rigoletto (1851) and La traviata (1853). Yet there is so much thrilling music here, much of it contained in the short prelude: first a mysterious woodwind melody, then a threatening interruption from the brass, followed by a soft staccato response from the strings and a hellish shriek from flutes and piccolos – the drama’s every mood, from sinister to violent to illusory, contained in less than 20 bars. The orchestra of the Teatro Regio has this music in its sinews. So too does Noseda.

Now that the Multi-Story Orchestra has been admitted into the mainstream for the second year running, deservedly, with its inclusion in the BBC Proms, we shouldn’t forget that its activities run at Bold Tendencies, on the disused top four floors of Peckham municipal car park, all summer, and independently, drawing audiences you don’t see at mainstream concerts. It’s hard to stress the importance of the enterprise.

A recent innovation is a chamber series in the more intimate Straw auditorium, sited between the concrete slabs of levels 7 and 8 and made from brass, gold and straw bales. Here last week, Kate Whitley, pianist, composer and Multi-Story co-founder, together with Richard Uttley, gave two performances of Stravinksy’s The Rite of Spring in the piano duet version – which Stravinsky once persuaded Debussy to play through with him ahead of the 1913 full orchestral premiere. Debussy may have been an unflappable chap and a fine pianist but this must have been quite some test. As Whitley explained, it’s fiendishly difficult. Both she and Uttley made a couple of helpful points about the Rite before storming and dancing through the work itself, hands and bodies snaking round each other as they rattled out the complex rhythms of the 20th century’s most influential composition.

On one piano (the same transcription is more often played on two), inevitably, the thunderous, percussive elements from the bottom of the keyboard stand out more stridently than the lyrical, sustained passages higher up. If the vivid orchestral brilliance is lost, a structural clarity takes its place. The Rite of Spring was the work the Multi-Story Orchestra played at its first concert in 2011. They’re back playing it on 9 and 10 September. It’s worth every long step up Simon Whybray’s cheerful “Hi boo I love you” bubblegum pink staircase, not just for the music, or for the incredible views of London’s skyline. With Southwark council planning to demolish the car park and bid farewell to Bold Tendencies and other occupants when their leases run out, go while you have the chance. It may not be there for ever.

Star ratings (out of 5)
Macbeth ★★★
The Rite of Spring ★★★★