Sunday Afternoon at the Opera - Verdi: Macbeth

Sunday Afternoon at the Opera host Keith Brown writes:

Amongst his many early operas Macbeth (1847, revised 1865) is acknowledged as Verdi's first true masterpiece. It inaugurates the composer's glorious middle period, with La Traviata, Rigoletto, and Il Trovatore soon to follow. Verdi's mind was attuned to all the fantastic and horrific elements in Shakespeare's Scottish play, especially the witches, who play an even more important role in the opera than they do in the Elizabethan stagework. Those nineteenth century "gothick" elements make this opera ideal for broadcast at Halloweentide.

Macbeth is well represented in the Verdi discography. We have several now historic LP recordings of it in our station's classical music record library. The oldest one, released through RCA Victor in 1959 in early stereo sound, features the cast, chorus, and orchestra of the Metropolitan Opera, Erich Leinsdorf conducting.(Macduff here is the recently deceased and much esteemed Italian tenor Carlo Bergonzi.) I broadcast that recording on Sunday, November 15, 1987. There's also a 1965 London three-LP boxed set, with American conductor Thomas Schippers leading the chorus and orchestra the Accademia di Santa Cecilia of Rome and an all-Italian cast of singers, with the sole exception of Swedish soprano Birgit Nilsson as Lady Macbeth. That recording went over the air on Sunday, October 30, 2005.

From the Hartford Public Library's compact disc collection I borrowed for broadcast the 1986 Hungaroton Macbeth, employing Hungarian musical resources but starring the Italian baritone Piero Capuccilli in the title role. Lamberto Gardelli was conducting. That one I aired on Sunday, October 29, 2000.

The same Italian maestro was in charge in a 1971 Decca/London Macbeth on three vinyl discs. Gardelli led the London Symphony Orchestra and Ambrosian Opera Chorus. One of the single greatest baritone voices of the twentieth century, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau (1925-2013), portrays the ill-fated Thane of Cawdor. The late superstar tenor Luciano Pavarotti is Macduff. This Sunday you get to hear the 1971 London release, the third and last of the historic Macbeths we have in our station's collection.