It says on the sleeve that guitarist Marc Ducret's Lady M is ‘d'après Macbeth de William Shakespeare’, but I confess the wonderfully doomy up-drawl of the opening cut, ‘Scene 1: A Desert Place’, put me in mind of Black Sabbath's ‘Iron Man’. Which is not to say that heavy metal is a big influence here, but simply that Ducret's music-making runs a generous gamut of inspirations and moods, scuttling restlessly between different sound combinations. The result is a challenging piece of chamber opera in three sequences (or perhaps movements), with lots of misty heath-like spaces for Ducret's electric guitar to explore, as well as for two vocalists to run the measure over meaningful portions of Shakespeare's script. There are interesting repetitions for instance, the words: “Come, you spirits that tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here” echo through the work, first sung by countertenor Rodrigo Ferreira, then by soprano Léa Trommenschlager. As the title announces, this take on the Scottish Play is very much concerned with Lady Macbeth rather than her regicidal husband, and it's full of nervy pleasures.