By Giuseppe Verdi
A revival of the 2007 Festival Production supported by Jon and Julia Aisbitt
Sung in Italian with English supertitles
Listen to Audio Extracts:
Clips courtesy of EMI Classics. New Philharmonia Orchestra, Ambriosian Opera Chorus, Riccardo Muti
‘This tragedy is one of the greatest creations of man! If we can’t do
something great with it, let us at least try to do something out of the
ordinary …’ So wrote Verdi to his librettist, Piave, when starting work
on his adaptation of Shakespeare’s ‘Scottish play’. And, while no-one
now doubts that the resulting opera marked a magnificent milestone
in the composer’s mastery of dramatic writing, Richard Jones’s tartanclad
take on it lives up to Verdi’s words in being nothing if not wildly
and wonderfully ‘out of the ordinary’.
This broodingly fatalistic staging is conducted for this revival by the
Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra’s Principal Conductor, Vasily
Petrenko, recently hailed by The Times as a ‘Russian wizard’ following
his transformation of the orchestra’s artistic profile.
Polish baritone Andrzej Dobber (last heard here as Kurwenal in
the 2009 Festival’s Tristan und Isolde) reprises his interpretation of the
murderously ambitious, but ultimately nihilistic thane, while Swedish-
American soprano Erika Sunnegårdh makes her Festival debut as the
axe-wielding Lady Macbeth, whose guilt-haunted sleep-walking scene
is one of the unforgettable highlights of this dazzlingly inventive score.
Performance schedule Festival 2010
Key
* = Pre-performance talk available in the in the Ebert Room.
Creative team
Conductor Vasily Petrenko
Director Richard Jones
Revival Director Geoffrey Dolton
Designer Ultz
Lighting Designer Wolfgang Göbbel
Movement Director Linda Dobell
Cast
Lady Macbeth Erika Sunnegårdh
Macbeth Andrzej Dobber (June 13, 17, 20, 26, 29; July 2, 6, 10, 12) & Stephen Gadd (July 16, 21, 24)
Banquo Stanislav Shvets
Macduff Yonghoon Lee
Doctor/Servant/Herald Richard Mosley-Evans
Lady Macbeth's Lady-in-waiting Miriam Murphy
Malcolm Riccardo Massi
London Philharmonic Orchestra
The Glyndebourne Chorus