Reviews

It would be a pleasure to report that the Dallas Opera has begun its second half-century with a triumph, but, well, ahem, shuffle, mumble ...

The production of Verdi's Macbeth that opened Friday night at Fair Park Music Hall does have its assets. Chief among them is the playing of the orchestra under music director Graeme Jenkins, who has a visceral connection to the score and the skills to bring it to life. From snarling brass and screeching winds to delicate wisps and shivers of muted strings, the sounds from the pit are fine-tuned and generously expressive – and, where appropriate, hair-raising.

The chorus, prepared by Alexander Rom, sings rousingly and well, apart from the all but inevitable drift of intonation during an unaccompanied passage.

Eric Halfvarson is a powerful Banquo, his vibrato a little loose but his bass full and dark. Brandon Jovanovich's Macduff delivers a thrillingly muscular tenor, but also sensitive phrasing. Joseph Hu, as Malcolm, can't be called subtle, and his hairdo makes him look like a woman, but he's certainly imposing.

But what, you ask, about the principals?

Well, Tatiana Serjan certainly throws herself into the part of the conniving and ultimately deranged Lady Macbeth, with a big, blazing soprano. Maybe occasional intonation issues will settle down in subsequent performances.

As Macbeth, Alberto Gazale produces a generous and handsome baritone. But he's a cipher as an actor, with no suggestion of emotional specificity. When he is supposed to be terrified by the ghosts, he seems no more discomfited than if he'd forgotten to pick up milk on the way back to the castle. And, lovely as the voice is, he oozes too much around pitches.

Then there's the matter of the production, from Seattle Opera.

Designer Robert Israel's set is a sterile institutional interior, with bluish panels and roll-up garage doors. Scrims come and go. Piles of big stones appear here and there. When Lady Macbeth laments her blood-stained hands, what's supposed to be blood oozes from the walls; alas, it looks more like streaks of printer's ink. Marie Barrett's lighting is unsubtle.

The witches are done up half as veiled brides in white, half as veiled mourners in black. That, according to stage director Bernard Uzan, is to represent life as all about beginnings and endings. (Wouldn't have guessed that, would you?) That, too, is supposed to be the "message" of the stones: things being built and torn down. An apelike skeleton stenciled on a wall is similarly supposed to represent development. It, dear reader, has come to this.

Something might have been made of some of this. And the decision to costume the cast in clothes of mid-19th-century Italy, when Verdi composed the opera, with only accents of plaid sashes, could work.

But this mishmash of concepts goes off in too many directions at once, distracting from the drama rather than focusing it. Further distracting on opening night were long pauses between scenes, which in an opera as episodic as this completely sapped the dramatic urgency. Why such long pauses, when so little scene changing was involved?

It was a frustrating night at the opera.

• Repeats at 2 p.m. Sunday and 7:30 p.m. Wednesday and Nov. 16 at Fair Park Music Hall. $25 to $199. 214-443-1000, www.dallasopera.org. $15 to $199.

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