Macbeth (Verdi)
May. 1st, 2018 08:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cahnHampson, Marrocu / Poutney (3+/5, not due to Poutney)
Opera in English (Keenlyside, Moore) (3+/5)
Verdi's Macbeth is great because it's Verdi, although I did not go crazy for it like I did with Traviata or Don Carlo because, well, in an opera that's based on a play that's all about the slow descent into evil and deadening of one's emotions and sensibilities, there are... not as many awesome duets and trios and complicated family relationships.
Although I was blindsided for this a bit because the first scene has an awesome duet between Macbeth and Banquo, and then there is another awesome duet between Macbeth and Lady Macbeth after killing Duncan, but after that the awesome duets are sadly rather thinner on the ground. Though Verdi also decided he wanted the witches to be a full chorus and also the third main character after Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, which I think is great. And Macbeth is an awesome baritone role, so there's that!
Simon Keenlyside and Latonia Moore's Opera in English version is great, as one might expect (Moore is great as Lady M), although the lyrics are often unintentionally hilarious in that double-google-translate English->Italian->English kind of way, and also it turns out that in general Verdi in English is just much less comprehensible than Mozart or Tchaikovsky in English (which makes sense, it just has a much thicker texture). Also, Verdi did get it down to a tad over two hours, even with arias, which means most of the action was extremely compressed, like this (of course I'm paraphrasing):
Macbeth: I am totally not going to take the throne by doing anything bad. Nope. Not gonna.
[a couple of scenes pass without Macbeth in them]
Lady Macbeth: The king is coming to visit. We gotta kill him. Do you understand?
Macbeth: Completely? Completely. ...What if we fail?
Lady Macbeth:But screw your courage to the sticking-place, and We'll not fail if you do not waver.
Macbeth: OK. Is this a dagger I see before me?
Which, not even remembering the original Shakespeare, I thought was awfully quick! I would have been happy with maybe slightly shorter arias and a little more conversation where Macbeth had to be convinced. (Though Keenlyside... did kinda sell it, with his "Completely. Completely!" highlighting a marked change.)
Not in love with but totally intrigued by: the Poutney production in the above Youtube video. So you know how I can't stop talking about the modern Decker-Salzburg production of La Traviata because every single element of the set and choreography was carefully chosen and thought out to set off the central themes? This modern production... it kind of looks like to me that Poutney just dumped in whatever he was feeling like at the time. The witches hanging out in casual 21st-C dress doing stereotypically feminine things like their nails? Sure. Mummies covered in newspaper? Why the heck not!
Duncan is not a speaking part in the opera, so they... made his face gold? And also put him on a palanqin?
And then I thought I had cracked the secret of the production! The Macbeths come out with green ichor on their hands after killing Duncan-in-goldface:
You can see the green goo in her hand, and then it gets smeared all over both of them, because apparently Duncan's green-goo blood is also an aphrodisiac:
This scene is incredibly and disturbingly hot, and of course the point is that it's supposed to show their abandonment to evil -- it's really well done by Hampson and Marrocu -- although being me I was also wondering how long it takes to get green goo off oneself. Fortunately the Macbeths have a bit of a breather before they have to be on stage again.
Anyway, the point is that I suddenly thought, wait, WAIT, is this a conception where Duncan and Macduff are gold-faced aliens (well, Macduff doesn't have a gold face, but he has blue hair, so maybe he's in the larval stage) and the Earth is under alien rule and the Macbeths are actually the good guys in trying to free Earth from the alien yoke and killing all the alien babies, only of course everyone is brainwashed into thinking the aliens are awesome so Macbeth is still consumed with guilt about it?? And the witches are, like, the remnant of the human rebellion and the only ones who remember really human things like doing their nails? That would be fantastic!!
...Only now that I've watched it to the end, that's probably not what's going on in this production -- I mean, I could make a case for it, but there's just too much stuff packed in.
But someone should still do the production where they're aliens. I'm just saying.
Opera in English (Keenlyside, Moore) (3+/5)
Verdi's Macbeth is great because it's Verdi, although I did not go crazy for it like I did with Traviata or Don Carlo because, well, in an opera that's based on a play that's all about the slow descent into evil and deadening of one's emotions and sensibilities, there are... not as many awesome duets and trios and complicated family relationships.
Although I was blindsided for this a bit because the first scene has an awesome duet between Macbeth and Banquo, and then there is another awesome duet between Macbeth and Lady Macbeth after killing Duncan, but after that the awesome duets are sadly rather thinner on the ground. Though Verdi also decided he wanted the witches to be a full chorus and also the third main character after Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, which I think is great. And Macbeth is an awesome baritone role, so there's that!
Simon Keenlyside and Latonia Moore's Opera in English version is great, as one might expect (Moore is great as Lady M), although the lyrics are often unintentionally hilarious in that double-google-translate English->Italian->English kind of way, and also it turns out that in general Verdi in English is just much less comprehensible than Mozart or Tchaikovsky in English (which makes sense, it just has a much thicker texture). Also, Verdi did get it down to a tad over two hours, even with arias, which means most of the action was extremely compressed, like this (of course I'm paraphrasing):
Macbeth: I am totally not going to take the throne by doing anything bad. Nope. Not gonna.
[a couple of scenes pass without Macbeth in them]
Lady Macbeth: The king is coming to visit. We gotta kill him. Do you understand?
Macbeth: Completely? Completely. ...What if we fail?
Lady Macbeth:
Macbeth: OK. Is this a dagger I see before me?
Which, not even remembering the original Shakespeare, I thought was awfully quick! I would have been happy with maybe slightly shorter arias and a little more conversation where Macbeth had to be convinced. (Though Keenlyside... did kinda sell it, with his "Completely. Completely!" highlighting a marked change.)
Not in love with but totally intrigued by: the Poutney production in the above Youtube video. So you know how I can't stop talking about the modern Decker-Salzburg production of La Traviata because every single element of the set and choreography was carefully chosen and thought out to set off the central themes? This modern production... it kind of looks like to me that Poutney just dumped in whatever he was feeling like at the time. The witches hanging out in casual 21st-C dress doing stereotypically feminine things like their nails? Sure. Mummies covered in newspaper? Why the heck not!
Duncan is not a speaking part in the opera, so they... made his face gold? And also put him on a palanqin?
And then I thought I had cracked the secret of the production! The Macbeths come out with green ichor on their hands after killing Duncan-in-goldface:
You can see the green goo in her hand, and then it gets smeared all over both of them, because apparently Duncan's green-goo blood is also an aphrodisiac:
This scene is incredibly and disturbingly hot, and of course the point is that it's supposed to show their abandonment to evil -- it's really well done by Hampson and Marrocu -- although being me I was also wondering how long it takes to get green goo off oneself. Fortunately the Macbeths have a bit of a breather before they have to be on stage again.
Anyway, the point is that I suddenly thought, wait, WAIT, is this a conception where Duncan and Macduff are gold-faced aliens (well, Macduff doesn't have a gold face, but he has blue hair, so maybe he's in the larval stage) and the Earth is under alien rule and the Macbeths are actually the good guys in trying to free Earth from the alien yoke and killing all the alien babies, only of course everyone is brainwashed into thinking the aliens are awesome so Macbeth is still consumed with guilt about it?? And the witches are, like, the remnant of the human rebellion and the only ones who remember really human things like doing their nails? That would be fantastic!!
...Only now that I've watched it to the end, that's probably not what's going on in this production -- I mean, I could make a case for it, but there's just too much stuff packed in.
But someone should still do the production where they're aliens. I'm just saying.
no subject
Date: 2018-05-08 03:21 am (UTC)