With the peremptory axing of all its funding last September, Mid Wales Opera has already been dealt a deathblow by the Arts Council of Wales. The company’s strong and sterling new Verdi staging – now confirmed as its last full-scale production – makes the council’s decision look all the more ludicrous.
Fielding a cast of 17, and the 16 musicians of Ensemble Cymru plus a community chorus, this may not be full-scale Verdi, but there is absolutely no compromise on integrity. With some fine musical characterisation from the principals as well as those in cameo roles, and a particularly blazing finale to act one, there is a wonderful sense of a defiant upholding of MWO values by artistic director/designer Richard Studer and music director Jonathan Lyness. It is as good a production as any in their 20-year tenure.
Studer’s single set is simple but effective: a three-tiered dais offers a subtle variety of levels, with hanging chains hinting at menace, and antlered and branched panels on either side (the latter looking rather like giant Scottish shortbread fingers). Costumes mix a medieval touch with contemporary. The witches – extended to a coven by Verdi, so as to give them equal dramatic status with Macbeth and Lady Macbeth – wear tartan jackets and red-devil shoes. The soldiers are in black and jackbooted.
In the title role is Jean-Kristof Bouton, a Canadian baritone of much vocal presence and well-managed colouring, who conveyed powerfully the torment that so soon invades Macbeth’s psyche. Mari Wyn Williams, after some slightly rough sounds as she warmed up, gave a very assured performance as Lady Macbeth. There was a cutting edge to her voice that would surely have met with Verdi’s approval, all naked ambition and sangfroid, and she realised in the sleepwalking scene a slow decline into insanity without undue histrionics. Emyr Wyn Jones is an excellent Banquo, resonant and diction-perfect in this Jeremy Sams translation, while Robyn Lyn Evans’s Macduff – broken by the Macbeths’ murder of his wife and children – sang with ringing Italianate tone. Tenor Joseph Buckmaster made his mark as Malcolm.
Verdi’s conjuring of the supernatural and the diabolical in this score was effectively realised by Ensemble Cymru, with conductor Lyness – whose reduced orchestration this was – bringing an urgency to the intimations of mania. The appearance of the community chorus – representing the refugees lamenting the fate of their Scottish homeland, their injuries tended by Red Cross nurses – added a note of the present and a painful reminder that Macbeth’s tyranny lives on the world over.
• At the Courtyard, Hereford, 16 March, then touring until 23 March
