In the important supporting parts, we had Ryan Speedo Green as Banquo and Freddie De Tommaso as Macduff. The former moved through his music “without incident,” either positive or negative; the latter, with a well-balanced tenor of narrow span but appropriate Italianate quality, gave us the evening’s best minutes of sensitively rendered recitative (“Oh figli! Oh figli miei!”) and of firmly phrased, nicely shaded line in the following aria, “Ah, la paterna mano.” Finally, it is no joy for me to continue to remark on the work of Nézet-Séguin and the Met orchestra in canonical E-19 operas. Of course these are skilled players, and he a knowledgeable musician. But time after time, their collaboration amounts to a skimming of the surface, so that the contours of the piece in question are discernible, but without much indication of any commitment to the dramatic impulse from which the contours arose in the first place. By bar 19 of the Prelude, I was astonished by the rushed, perfunctory sloughing-through of the brass’s rude interruption to the violins’ first hints of  sleepwalking music—and so it went, especially with the darker, weightier passages so fundamental to the tinta of this score.

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The production’s director is Louisa Proske, new to the company. She’s been directing operas, musicals, and plays hither and yon over the last few seasons, but before that was a co-founder and director for Heartbeat Opera here in New York. My encounters with Heartbeat (see my comments on their Fidelio, in “Where Are We?”, 6/10/22, and “Vanessa Outed. Plus: Susan Sontag on Opera as Camp,” 5/9/25) postdate her involvement with that company, and I don’t find much of Heartbeat’s cultural attitude in her Macbeth, which is also not what we’d call a High Concept production. In the costuming (by Montana Levi Blanco), there is even a suggestion of the proceedings being left in period (that of the playwright, however, not of the action of play or opera), and there is not the outright reversal of the creators’ values to be found in so many contemporary productions. There are, though, three directorial interventions that cannot be reconciled to the givens of the opera, and which seriously compromise the production’s integrity and effect. They can be summed up as witches; dancing and fighting; and death and triumph. 

Witches. Verdi was quite adamant about it: the witches are the third principal character in his opera. And since his Macbeth is an opera, not a play, a paltry three would not do. They must constitute a chorus, and the chorus must be written according to the expectations of the composer’s time and place. And some of the witches must dance. ^(I) Because of these necessities, the witches take up more stage time in the opera than they do in the play. Still, having declared himself on the matter, Verdi restricted their appearances to two scenes. We are kept aware of them through the many baleful references to their prophecies, but they remain in an occult cosmos that humans stumble across and then learn to access; otherwise, this “principal character” stays out of sight. Having planted a seed, they know it must grow through the free-will choices of the protagonist couple. Proske, though, having noticed to her apparent surprise that in the opera “the witches have proliferated from three to a full-blown chorus,” has decided, first, that they must illustrate “corruption of the flesh” by feeding on the field of the dead, and second that they should be omnipresent throughout the action, peeping over the tops of the sets and out of the nooks and crannies of the castle’s spaces. She has also decided, in best auteurial fashion, that her judgment is better than Verdi’s (and Shakespeare’s) in this respect. So on the blasted heath, the hags hop hungrily from corpse to corpse and flounce their dresses in our faces, and through the rest of the action poke their noses inside the sightlines, in every instance pulling focus from the essential events of scenes. It’s a calamitous distraction.