Verdi: Macbeth

Macbeth, Verdi’s first Shakespearean opera, is thrillingly dark and imaginative, its score a bubbling cauldron of hubris, brutality, mystery, insanity, tragedy and compassion. Riccardo Muti is in his element, driving the drama and framing the grandly vivid interpretations of Sherrill Milnes and Fiorenza Cossotto as the Macbeths, the glowingly youthful Macduff of José Carreras and the dignified, but doomed Banquo of Ruggero Raimondi.