Stunning recording of the French version of Verdi's Macbeth with Roberto Abbado and the Filarmonia Arturo Toscanini

« (...) but in Macbeth, as really in all of Verdi’s works, the focus and direction given to the music by the conductor is just as important (as the singers), and Roberto Abbado delivers with a taut, urgent reading that encapsulates the essence of Shakespeare’s drama as well as Verdi’s music. (...) Abbado’s conducting has bite and drive; in fact, and I mean no disrespect, his conducting sounds more dramatically «alive» than many of his father’s opera recordings, all of which were well and musically shaped but somehow always seemed to miss the essential underlying drama of the music. The opera moves at an almost relentless pace, not overly fast but with an urgency in every note and phrase that keeps the drama in the forefront no matter how rat-a-tat those Italian rhythms are, and for this he must be commended.
Indeed, Abbado, like Riccardo Muti in the Milnes-Cossotto recording, pulls the various threads of the score together to present a unified whole, which makes every second of this recording work, even when a singer (like our Macduff) is sub-par. One good example among many of what I mean is the march, which almost sounds like Italian party music, that suddenly emerges in the scene with Lady Macbeth (CD 1, track 8). There’s not much you can do with it other than just to endure it, but Abbado manages to make it sound like a lighthearted interlude that momentarily defuses the tense drama between Lady Macbeth’s lines just before it and Macbeth’s lines immediately following it. (...) Indeed, one of the most interesting things about this recording is that it feels like a live performance, and you get so caught up in the dramatic projection of the libretto that you scarcely notice that it’s in French and not Italian.»
The Art Music Lounge, Lynn René Bayley