Elizabeth I and Macbeth review – rare Rossini and riveting Verdi

English Touring Opera opened its spring season with a new production by the company’s artistic director, James Conway, of Rossini’s Elisabetta, Regina d’Inghilterra, performed under the title Elizabeth I. Premiered in Naples in 1815, the work is something of a rarity. Though it surfaces from time to time in concert, it has not been staged in the UK since 1818, and ETO should be commended for bringing it back into the repertory.

It is something of a problem piece. It deals with the relationship between Elizabeth I and her favourite the Earl of Leicester, and the latter’s rivalry with the Duke of Norfolk – both for the Queen’s attentions and for covert political control of England. But it whirls off into unhistorical territory by making Leicester’s wife, Matilde, a daughter of Mary, Queen of Scots. Since Mary had no daughters, some have judged the narrative preposterous, though the real drawback is the opera’s slow dramaturgy, which creates inescapable longueurs in the first act. The score, some of which Rossini recycled for The Barber of Seville, is uneven, though it contains tremendous individual numbers, in particular the two big showdowns, for Elizabeth and Matilde, then Leicester and Norfolk, in act two.

ETO has certainly done it proud. Conway’s straightforward staging makes much of the courtly rituals behind which emotions fester and conspiracies are hatched. Mary Plazas admirably captures Elizabeth’s loneliness of soul and crises of conscience in singing of refined beauty. Luciano Botelho and John-Colyn Gyeantey square off thrillingly as Leicester and Norfolk, Lucy Hall stands out as the nobly assertive Matilde, and John Andrews conducts with an ideal combination of care and panache.

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Joining it on tour, is a formidable new production by James Dacre of Verdi’s Macbeth, that hauls the piece into the present day, setting it in a faceless concrete jungle where assassins lurk in the darkness and CCTV records your every move. What turns out to be Cawdor’s corpse swings from a gibbet at the start and, in a brilliant touch, the Witches have become field hospital nurses, whom we first encounter laying out the dead and swabbing blood off the floor, and who later return to preside with clinical precision over the catastrophes their prophecies have caused. There are hints throughout that the Macbeths, Grant Doyle and Madeleine Pierard, have sublimated their sexual and emotional failures in their icy lust for power, while Andrew Slater’s Banquo is tellingly suspicious of their ambition from the outset.

There’s a lapse in act four, when Dacre allows Lady Macbeth to sleepwalk long before she needs to, but it’s a riveting piece of theatre nonetheless.

It sounds good, too. Doyle’s declamatory way with the opening scenes gives way to a fierce, expressive lyricism as guilt and isolation begin to corrode both Macbeth’s mind and his sense of his own integrity. Pierard, her tone a mixture of silk and metal, is electrifying throughout.

Slater blusters a bit, but Amar Muchhala makes a fine Macduff, his grief at the murder of his family really hitting home. Gerry Cornelius propels the score forward with tremendous urgency, and the choral singing is excellent. It’s one of ETO’s finest recent achievements: don’t miss it.