Susanne Elmark / Reseñas

Christopher Ward provided the evening with focused, balanced direction, making sense of the score’s metallic textures, interjections of arrhythmic percussion and myriad musical references without depriving the most grandly-scaled scenes of their force. The choir, too, were on fine form, bringing a vast, weighty sound to key moments. If Mr Widmann intended the opening chorus and the surprisingly optimistic conclusion to sound unwieldy and slightly chaotic, the massed forces of the orchestra and choir gave them an accessible immediacy. Indeed, the musical clarity of Babylon’s most ambitious moments went some distance to tempering the story’s dramatic imbalances. If Mr Sloterdijk’s libretto was unwilling to let plot or character get in the way of large themes, Mr Widmann’s flirtations with traditional operatic pleasures and his ability to construct scenes on an epic scale may prove enough to draw audiences into the opera’s intellectual world. Babylon has traditionally been a world of spectacle, and the opera, for all its attempts at revisionism, was not without its own sense of the spectacular.

Hrólfur Sæmundsson gives a scenically intense Macbeth with a wonderfully robust baritone. Christian Tschelebiew , with his wonderfully dark bass, is an equal partner as a general. Susanne Elmark is a highly dramatic Lady Macbeth, who always tends to be slightly acrimonious. But this is quite appropriate for the role of Lady Macbeth. Diego Silva is struggling as Macduff that evening: the voice doesn't carry, has hardly any body and tends towards unpleasantly strong vibrato. Robert Maszl reliably plays Malcolm. Eyrún Unnarsdóttir as Lady Macbeth's dame and Flurin Caduff as doctor/servant/murderer/herald complete the ensemble.