I listened last night to the online streaming of Verdi’s Macbeth from the Metropolitan Opera. I was very happy with Gianandrea Noseda’s conducting and with the sound of the orchestra. The only soloist who impressed me favorably was the tenor Dimitri Pittas. Günther Groissböck who looks good in photos did not make much impression vocally one way or the other. Thomas Hampson doesn’t have the right sort of voice for Macbeth IMHO. In the last act he sounded flabbergasted, like an old character in an opera buffa. Nadja Michael’s voice is not pleasant. I would not describe her performance as note-perfect. And her singing of the words sounded like Italian a third of the time, and like nonsense sounds the rest of the time. There was no dramatic intelligence to compensate for the lack of pleasant musical sound. On the basis of my listening last night, I have no plans to go to New York for one of the performances in the near future.