NEW YORK — Tyranny and uprising are in fashion onstage: At least 10 opera companies have chosen Verdi’s Macbeth to launch their season this fall. For its Sept. 22 opening-night gala, the Metropolitan Opera offered a starry cast and the company debut of a youngish director who has been making waves in New York and Europe. The sequin-studded audience left very happy, as did I, though I retained a few reservations.
Verdi’s 1847 opera was his first adaptation of Shakespeare, whose work he subsequently abandoned for 40 years. An 1865 version for Paris incorporated ballet music, usually eliminated but partially restored here, and eliminated Macbeth’s brief final aria, which was reintroduced. These edits mostly served to balance the durations of the first and second half, without particularly adding to the drama. Still, it’s hard to fault Shakespeare’s and Verdi’s theatrical instincts. It’s a puzzle why the composer didn’t return to the Bard for four decades before writing two masterpieces, Otello and Falstaff.
One of the Met’s new generation of directors, Berlin-born Louisa Proske, 42, developed her taste for Shakespeare at Cambridge, where she studied English literature. In 2014, with a Yale School of Drama classmate she co-founded New York’s innovative Heartbeat Opera, noted for small-scale but dramatically powerful updatings of classic repertoire. In 2021, she became deputy artistic director and resident director of the Halle Opera, where she established herself on the German directorial scene. Her upcoming 2026-27 season includes both theater and opera in the U.S. and beyond, including a new Don Giovanni for the Paris Opera.
While Heartbeat productions usually incorporate major cuts in duration and scoring, this Macbeth was anything but minimalist. Montana Levi Blanco’s sumptuous Elizabethan costumes contrasted with Jon Bausor’s moody, misty sets that portrayed a crumbling society. Set on a turntable, a palace interior alternated with a rubble-strewn outdoor clearing, whose curved upstage wall was at times penetrated with portals for the supernatural.
A large coven of witches — 38 singers and a dozen dancers — infiltrated nearly every scene, drawing their perverse and insinuating power from the lead couple’s raw corruption. Jorrell Lawyer-Jefferson’s choreography and Ran Arthur Braun’s movement direction enlivened the stage with processions, acrobatic sword play and even Caucasian folk dancing, allowing cast and chorus to remain relatively motionless as they sang. Adam Silverman’s lighting design created ominous shadows and used subtle spotlighting to lead the eye through the pervasive misty gloom.
The curtain rose on a frantic battle scene, with leaping warriors and the clang of swords; the frenzied activity allowed the singers — chorus and soloists — to stand and deliver without appearing static. Throughout the evening, witches insinuated themselves into almost every scene, leaping and cackling when left to their own devices. Outside, the massed forces were essentially reactive. Movement was largely absent from the interior scenes, where however the increasingly dastardly plots were hatched. Notable coups de théâtre included the three prophecies, represented by a monstrously pregnant witch giving birth three times, and by the most convincing Birnam Wood finale I’ve ever seen. It should be mentioned that there’s a lot of blood throughout.
In the title role, Quinn Kelsey stole the show with his fierce and conflicted portrayal, beautifully sung. Most often cast as an unrepentant villain, his Macbeth showed the arc of a reluctant tyrant undone when he gave in to his wife’s ambitions. The luster of Kelsey’s singing almost contradicted his character, but nobody minded.
In her 10th Met role since her house debut in 2019, Lise Davidsen has become a company favorite and box-office draw. While her powerful voice is especially prized in Wagner and Strauss roles, she has nonetheless been performing and recording Verdi since the beginning of her career, notably leading the cast in the Met’s 2024 production of La forza del destino.
Lady Macbeth is not yet an ideal fit for her voice and temperament, but the blistering power of her upper register delivered all the chills you want from Macbeth’s evil consort. Davidsen instead brought out the softer side of the Lady, sympathetic to her husband’s torment over his crimes and quietly tormented over her childless state (or, according to a director’s note, over her earlier loss of a child). In the second half, Davidsen began to tap the Lady’s conniving ferocity, but any erotic charge with her husband was difficult to discern. Yet in the sleepwalking scene, as she wandered through the palace and the rubble outside, she was truly pathetic, her exquisite high pianissimos signaling the Lady’s loosening grip on reality.
Ryan Speedo Green was a dignified Banquo, but his mellifluous bass-baritone was a vocal mismatch for a role that demands a darker timbre. Freddie De Tommaso’s Macduff had swagger and a stentorian voice, without much subtlety. Smaller parts were ably handled, with special nods to Marcy Stonikas’ Lady-in-Waiting and Jonathan Burton’s Malcolm.
Met music director Yannick Nézet-Séguin led the score with power and expression in one of the best pit performances I’ve heard from this orchestra in a long time. The opening measures stated the work’s themes with rhetorical clarity and vivid instrumental colors. Tempos were sometimes unusually broad, but the pacing never flagged: Even the audience refrained from applauding after each musical number (though Kelsey, Davidsen, and the chorus earned that tribute). The orchestra boomed forth dramatically when needed but never covered the soloists — a criticism often leveled at the music director.
The chorus sounded refreshed and splendid after their summer break. The lament of the starving refugees, “Patria oppressa,” treated as a pivotal dramatic moment, was a highlight of the evening.
The fine musical performances and often impressive staging made the overall effect exciting. With seven more performances before the cinema relay to refine the dramaturgy, especially the chemistry between Macbeth and his wife, this promises to become an effective and moving portrayal of the perverse corruption at the heart of tyranny.
Macbeth continues through Oct. 30, with an HD broadcast on Oct. 17. For tickets go here.
