Macbeth
Edinburgh Festival Theatre
Rating: *****

Scottish Opera's annual contributions to Edinburgh's programme have often been overshadowed by the visits of more glamorous foreign companies. But this year, with their new production of Macbeth directed by Luc Bondy, they deservedly have the spotlight to themselves. Dramatically and musically it is hard to fault, and Verdi's first true masterpiece emerges as a totally compelling piece of music drama.

The show is a collaboration between the festival, Scottish Opera and the Vienna Festival. Extra funding has been put to good use not only in Rolf Glittenberg's set, all curving wood and aerial walkways, and in Rudy Sabounghi's costumes, but in the meticulous preparation that has clearly gone into every aspect of the performances, for which Bondy and the conductor Richard Armstrong must share credit.

Bondy's ability to home in on the dramatic essentials of every opera he directs is astonishing. The first act of this Macbeth is dominated by a bed, the source of the power that Lady Macbeth exerts over her husband. In the second there is the banqueting table laid with butchers' knives, while Macbeth's hired assassins don butchers' aprons to murder Banquo. His body is a grisly presence throughout the feast, making the appearances of his ghost the simplest and most effective thing in the world to manage.

But then the hallmarks of this production are the effortless fluency and rightness of every element. The witches and the apparitions are thoroughly convincing, without a trace of dry ice. The weird sisters are a plausible bunch of late-20th-century slappers, got up in too-tight dresses and unsuitable shoes, who can slip into a hilariously camp routine in the opening chorus and gleefully dismember a bloody corpse in the third act.

We are not in a world of metaphor and message, though; everything stems from the score and Verdi's own dramaturgy. Movement, under the direction of Lucinda Childs, is economical and always pertinent, though with a choreographer of her eminence involved it is odd that the ballet Verdi wrote for the Paris revival of the opera is omitted. Otherwise the performance basically follows that later, 1865 version of the score, though the ending is the original 1847 one, without the last, triumphal chorus.

Armstrong conducts it with combative urgency, and strikes sparks from a cast led by the formidable Lady Macbeth of Kathleen Broderick, employing every particle of her sexual allure and spitting out her set pieces with tingling theatricality, and the Macbeth of easy, expressive musicality from Richard Zeller.

Carsten Stabell's Banquo is solid and secure, while the only Italian in the line-up, the tenor Marco Berti, makes that count in the ringing authority of his Macduff. But everyone onstage makes their presence felt; this is a glorious, company show, founded on the wholehearted commitment of the orchestra and chorus - an exceptional achievement.

Further performances tonight and Saturday Box office: 0131 473 2000.