If Shakespeare's Macbeth is already bloodthirsty, dark, barbaric, ferocious, atavistic and telluric, Verdi's operatic reworking of this work not only keeps intact the strength of the original but, by concentrating and essentialising it, he even increases it. Verdi's Macbeth is the ultimate party of wickedness and an orgy of moral perversion. Stylistically, it is a rare opera that does not fit anywhere – chronologically it should be inscribed in late bel canto, but...

Liceu has opened the season with Macbeth, a title that hadn’t been featured in the theatre for more than 10 years. Musically, this Verdi opera still shows some traces of some late Bel Canto remains but also starts to announce the maturity and the personal style of the great central trilogy (Rigoletto, Traviata, Trovatore). Dramatically, it preserves and it even concentrates and thickens all of the primal violent, bloody, atavistic and barbaric theatrical strength of...