Macbeth
Opera North
Punch and Judy
Young Vic
The Minotaur
Covent Garden
Don Giovanni
English Touring Opera, Cambridge
In a hectic and heterogeneous operatic week, three out of four of the things I saw were successful or even triumphant, so you couldn’t call it typical. Opera North’s new production of Verdi’s Macbeth largely erased memories of last year’s deplorable effort at Glyndebourne, and was therefore a matter for gratitude. Unlike that production, it wholly de-tartanised the opera, which is all to the good. Tim Albery presented it as a study in the pathology of political ambition and of the guilt to which acting on ambition leads. If that left quite a lot of the opera dangling, I think that is more Verdi’s than Albery’s fault. The Witches were, as they almost always are, problematic, a collection of malignant charwomen. I know Verdi didn’t regard them as witches in a traditional sense, but the music he wrote for them fails to clarify what he thought they were.
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