Word: strehler
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Fiendlike Queen. Strehler's Macbeth turned out to be carefully thought out but disappointing. The play is one of Shakespeare's most vivid, bloody and craftily psychological works. So was Verdi's operatic treatment when he finally finished revising it 18 years after its 1847 premiėre. Strehler's stylized production is bloodless and static; lethal emotion is indicated by second-rate symbols. Once they seize the throne, Macbeth and his lady trail around in long, heavy robes apparently intended to represent both royalty and their guilty burden. But the onlooker simply worries about whether...
Were Verrett the Lady Macbeth many had anticipated, perhaps Strehler's mannered direction would have been less bothersome. Both visually and vocally, Verrett conveyed little of Shakespeare's "fiendlike queen." Verdi wanted Lady Macbeth to be "twisted and ugly" and to sing with a "raw, choked, hollow voice." That may be asking too much. But Verrett's bland, unchanging facial expression and her constant concern-except in the sleepwalking scene, her best musical moment-with polished tone did not begin to get inside a character that is more important to the opera than Macbeth...
...Marriage of Figaro alone. One takes heart in the present, when a work of such bite and compassion can be done as well as it was on the Paris Opéra's first night in New York. Among the many talents at work was the same essential Strehler as in Macbeth-but what a difference! It was as if he had taken his lead from the Figaro overture, that barely perceptible rustle of strings and woodwinds that swells to incandescence. All was succinct and imbued with restrained passion...
...Strehler, Cherubino is not really a silly little cherub, but a hot-blooded youth out to touch, hold, kiss and sleep with any woman who will have him. The result is that Cherubino becomes the mirror reflecting everyone else's sensuality. Other directorial details linger in the memory: the Countess singing of her lost love (Porgi amor), while behind her lies a trampled bed, the obvious result of a night of lonely tossing; the haunting way the light in the palace recedes in different layers of intensity as the day wanes...
...Italy's Giorgio Strehler, who was responsible for the opening productions of both La Scala and the Paris Opéra, is no ordinary director. When he says the music comes first, he means it. When he uses the phrase no man's land, he means that too; contrasting cases in point are the failure of his Macbeth and the success of his Figaro...