And there are places where they will pay you, in Germany, to sit down every day and coach singers in this music.” I”m completely enthralled in the sound world of Strauss and Salome. He became “a real recording nerd”, and reading about Solti’s time as a kapellmeister in Germany (literally a person in charge of making music, and the formal title of conductors in German opera houses), he realised “Okay. At 14, he says, he was “looking for any escape from suburban Dublin”, and Salome became “a real fixation of mine”. He had been a member of Dublin’s Palestrina Choir and, after his voice broke, filled the gap by paying more attention to his piano playing and then falling in love with opera, an experience sparked by buying Georg Solti’s recording of Strauss’s Salome with Birgit Nilsson in the title role. Irish conductor Killian Farrell, who next season becomes generalmusikdirektor (general music director) of the Staatstheater in Meiningen, at the southern end of the German state of Thuringia, found a radical solution to the problem. While doing that, they have to imagine a full stage and pay acute attention – as they would with an actual orchestra – to where the instruments would all be positioned, and show they can communicate with players who are not actually there. Because, in college, they will spend a lot of time conducting two pianists at two pianos. They need to find a way to get themselves in front of an actual orchestra. It's an added-value experience.One of the biggest challenges for young conductors is very easy to explain. "What's done cannot be undone." See the full play in a live theater, somewhere, and then see this movie for its distinctive ambience. Another effective touch, an interesting director's interpretation, is that Lady Macbeth slides over into madness specifically because of her husband's brutal murder of Macduff's family - she was willing to push him into assassination as a career move but didn't bargain for what it led to, which was outright destruction even of women and children and a reign of blood. If they don't have their own children to live for, it maybe makes it easier to understand why they would go ahead and do what they do. One added touch I thought was interesting came very early on where we see the Macbeths burying an infant daughter (who's only referred to obliquely in the play) and then losing a teenage son in battle. The various captains and soldiers with speaking parts are hard to tell from each other, but that's another reason to know the play before going in. David Thewlis (Duncan) and Elizabeth Debicki (Lady Macduff) are also notable, as are the three witches. Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard make a first-rate pair of leads. But this too adds to the atmosphere, as if the actors are standing outside themselves both watching and taking part. Second, most of the dialog is (appropriately enough) in thick Scottish accents but often almost whispered, as if the characters are speaking only to themselves or someone right beside them. I got the feeling that the director Justin Kurzel essentially assumes that his viewers will already know the play and are deliberately looking for a different, postmodern take on it. Otherwise, you might be lost not knowing who's doing what and to whom. Two reasons: first, a lot of the text has been cut (even though the complete play is not that long) and it will help a lot if you already know the plot and characters. I won't worry about giving away spoilers here because this is one of Shakespeare's best-known plays, but if you haven't seen it before, then this is maybe not the best place to start. Life is brutal, violent death is never far away, and the supernatural world is always just offstage. Hardscrabble peasants and soldiers dot the landscape, sometimes strangely motionless, sometimes lining the roads, but always enhancing an air of strangeness. The three Weird Sisters (who look superficially like peasant women but convey a genuinely creepy otherness) stand in fog-shrouded fields as they utter their cryptic warnings and prophecies to Macbeth and lurk in the background off to the side of the battles. That austere and foreboding setting underlies just about every scene. We're placed right into a medieval Scottish countryside with its strikingly beautiful landscapes, lochs, and mountains. This version of one of the greatest plays in the English language is worth seeing for the visuals alone.
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