<<  -- 5 --  Roderic Dunnett    FULL CIRCLE

The big chorus scene in England, all huddled cloaks and drifting snow, seemed even closer to Nabucco and Moses in Egypt than ever : a little licence, maybe, to indulge Garibaldian sensibilities pending final Italian unification in 1870; but also much-needed, as Shakespeare too realised, and offering an ideal vehicle for the tenor 'purity' of Macduff and Malcolm (highly promising Opera North find Peter Auty) -- both a psychological and an aural let-up. The grey and grim scene looks like the aftermath of the battle of Kursk, and even more intriguingly, the caged Macbeths remain onstage throughout, as if to underline the colourless mess their intrigues have got things in.

The apparitions are not just visually unnerving : the orchestration is hard at work too : desolate oboe, plus eerie open fifths and pizzicati for the exiled; quadruple trombones, sustained clarinet and superb, dark offstage woodwind for the rearstage Banquo family processional. As Miles's Banquo holds out the mirror for Michaels-Moore's by now unhinged Macbeth to see himself in, no wonder he replies with 'o mio terror'. For this tottering, haunted Macbeth, by now everything in Dunsinane is a 'terror'.

But Phyllida Lloyd's best imagining of all, to Verdi's dutifully inserted ballet music, is a stroke of sheer genius : a pipedream, almost believable, as the barren Macbeth couple cavort together with a clutch of, it seems, their own children around them, in a bedroom scene of perfect domesticity. Needless to say, the children are conjured in -- and as quickly whisked away -- by sundry weird sisters. What better way to taunt and bewitch childkillers than with a vengeful nightmare of their own childlessness?

The sleepwalking scene was mesmerising : Verdi's score here is breathtakingly inventive, with falling semitones in bassoon, disjointing intervals of a fourth, and shifting scalic figures in cellos and basses, plus pianissimi in the upper strings. Bryan Secombe made a sympathetic doctor; Guleghina's control -- she too can handle piano and mezzo-forte immaculately -- was fabulous. Her massive aria, later massively doubled by the orchestra, whipped the breath away. No surprise, either, that after her timely snuffing out it is in the golden 'cage' that Macbeth meets his solitary end, stuck through with spears amid a wry decor of red lanyards and ribbon, making the fifth (or possibly sixth) body we have been privileged to savour (though Piave has spared us Shakespeare's butchered Macduff family).

The moment is almost laid back, nonchalant, in the orchestra, as if the tyrant's passing has laid to rest all the self-made hype and frenzy. The army echoes the witch-red in its uniforms, and Macduff dons the scarlet apparel of the gory Bloody Apparition. The witches have done it again : another wheel has come full circle.