It doesn't matter who sings what. At some point, someone's fist is up someone else's rectum. Some of us were not even sure this was anatomically possible until the nihilistic Catalan director Calixto Bieito took up opera. Now it's routine.

In this case, the head witch has her digits in Macbeth's nether orifice. He takes it with an abstracted air. The thrusts help him hit his high notes. Ritual humiliation is a Bieito favourite, along with gratuitous slaughter and the creative use of bodily fluids. This time the chamber-maid makes the doctor drink a glass of her urine. Last year in Berlin, it was Bassa Selim with Konstanza. Such consistency might even be endearing, were it not all so crass.

This is Bieito's first production for the Frankfurt Opera. In the silence following the fisting, a lone voice cries, "Play the scene again, but with the director!"

In Bieito's eyes, Verdi's Macbethis a cautionary tale about financial and sexual power. Giant overhead screens advertise luxury consumer goods (sets: Alfons Flores; video: Rebecca Ringst). Everyone works for the Union Bank; this is a company outing gone hideously wrong. A promising start, in which Duncan is shown as a sleazy creep deserving death, if perhaps not quite torture, rape, and a final gouge with the corkscrew, degenerates in the course of the evening into the usual Bieito orgy of mindless drunken excess. Same production, different opera. In trying to capture the essence of horror and tragedy, he magnifies it so grotesquely that all impact is lost.

Infected by Bieito's brutality, Paolo Carignani conducts a coarse and uncouth Verdi, low in subtlety, high in volume.

Chorus and cast are excellent, with Caroline Whisnant achieving miracles of colour, shading and musically intelligent expression as Lady Macbeth, no matter whom she is corkscrewing, and Zeljko Lucíc superb as a sonorous, world-weary Macbeth. Who is, peculiarly, left alive at the end. As an illuminated text around the stage points out, this a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Tel +49 69 1340 400