Met Opera Live’s Macbeth: Netrebko’s singing stirred almost as much as her décolletage

This season of live Met relays got off to a most impressive start, with an electrifying account of Verdi’s tenth opera and first really great, though uneven piece, Macbetto (as I think it should be called; that’s what the central figure is called throughout). Fabio Luisi showed that he is far more at home conducting Verdi than Wagner — though his Bruckner performances are also magnificent. What made this the most stirring performance of Macbetto that I have seen was the strength of Željko Lucic’s performance in the title role. It is almost a cliché that the most interesting figure in the opera is ‘Lady’, as Verdi called her, but though Anna Netrebko gave as good as she got, the central tragic figure, with less to sing than his wife, and most of it less striking, remained the man who paradoxically commits his fearful deeds from weakness rather than from strength; and consequently elicits an unusual blend of feelings from the audience. Lucic is a singer we see far less of than we should: he is perhaps primarily an actor of great range and subtlety, but he has a large, firmly focused voice, the kind that is expressive in itself, though he is a fine user of the text, without being obtrusive; perfect, in fact.

Of course for the Met audience and no doubt many cinema viewers the centre of attention was Netrebko — who almost upstaged her performance in the opera by her hilarious interview in the intermission, insouciante, wicked English put to pungently idiosyncratic use. As Lady she first appeared as outrageously sexy, both in her singing — she now has a voluptuous voice — and in the extremity of her décolletage, which created a suspense all of its own, and still has me wondering. Her determination to get her husband to go ahead with Duncan’s murder seemed to be one more erotic game she played with him.