If Rigoletto is your bread and butter, who needs three witches to predict that Macbeth’s bound to be your jam? Count on Quinn Kelsey’s eponymous Highland regicide to invest the Metropolitan Opera’s season-opening new production of Verdi’s Shakespeare adaptation with frightening authority. By contrast, Lise Davidsen’s Lady Macbeth is the thrilling wild card. In heroic Wagner and Richard Strauss, her timbre, temperament, and the sheer immensity of her soprano put her in a league of her own. Diva vehicles of Verdi and Puccini are a less obvious fit, but she craves them, no one tells her no, and the fans eat it up when she exercises her prerogatives. Freddie De Tommaso appears as Macduff, whose wife and children Scotland’s usurper has slaughtered while their father recruits allies in England. The role is brief but his heartbreak, outrage, and steely determination coalesce in an aria that ranks with the glories of Verdi’s tenor repertoire. The director is Louisa Proske, who a decade ago was making waves as the cofounder of Heartbeat Opera, a shoestring outfit that prided itself on “doing what the Met can’t do.” Astonishingly, Heartbeat’s heartbeat lay in musical invention, distilling symphonic orchestrations to arrangements for WTF one-of-a-kind chamber combos numbering in the single digits. Theatrically, though, Heartbeat subscribed to the same no-holds-barred, smash-the-idols lingua franca that’s in vogue everywhere. Proske’s been out on her own for several seasons now. A rising star in the majors, she should feel quite at ease in her Met debut, though Yannick Nézet-Séguin will, of course, be playing Verdi’s pages as he wrote them. —Matthew Gurewitsch