Tag Archives: Janacek

Scottish Opera: Makropulos Affair

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Theatre Royal, Glasgow

In his penultimate opera, The Makropulos Affair, Leoš Janáček took a deep dive into the human psyche.  Is the secret to eternal life a precious gift or a wearisome curse, he appears to ask through the medium of his main protagonist Emilia Marty, an opera singer who is over 300 years old thanks to a secret elixir. She has disguised her longevity by inventing successive transformations of herself (though all with the initials EM), has reached a point where she needs to re-administer the magic potion, but having successfully procured the formula opts instead to end her weary existence.

The opera centres on the machinations of a long-running legal inheritance case, the litigants linked to the whereabouts of the original formula, on its tussles, tensions and the crushing dominance of Emilia superbly captured in Janáček’s intense, hyperactive score. What Scottish Opera brings to the table in this new co-production with Welsh National Opera (which premiered it in Cardiff three years ago) is a staging by Olivia Fuchs that feverishly amplifies the musical blueprint.

It is brutally direct, Fuchs creating (with the help of Nicola Turner’s epically stark and cavernous 1920s-style set, minimalist props of Gothic proportions, Robbie Butler’s shock-horror lighting and moody cinematic projections by video designer Sam Sharples) an intoxicating sense of the surreal alongside needle-sharp  characterisations. Just as the music sustains unceasing alertness and captivation from the Scottish Opera Orchestra under Martyn Brabbins, the theatre is vivid, electrifying and relentless.

So is David Pountney’s English translation which this evenly-balanced cast impart with a sharpness and clarity that almost, for once, makes the supertitles redundant. 

At its heart, though, is Orla Boylan’s commanding omnipresence as Emilia, as fascinating and scorchingly enigmatic as she is cold and manipulative. The rest revolve around her, their febrile self interests expressed to almost caricature extremes. Henry Waddington’s lawyerly Doctor Kolenatý is gnawingly bumptious; Mark Le Brocq, as Vítek, his highly-strung clerk. Roland Wood’s pompous Baron Prus cuts a striking foil to Ryan Capozzo as the excitable Albert Gregor. 

In their somewhat stereotypical character roles, Michael Lafferty’s haplessly fawning Janek and Alasdair Elliott’s ever-hopeful ageing lethario Count Hauk-Sendorf lighten the dark. Catriona Hewiston softens the mix with her glowing tenderness as budding opera singer Kristina.

While this production hits hard and fast, it somehow finds room for genuine belly laughs – even double entendres in the Great British farce tradition. All of which adds to the disarming humanity of this riveting show. There’s some finessing to do with one or two of the fearsomely difficult orchestra passages, and added scene-change music (from an unfinished symphony by Janáček) between the first two acts seems a little too manufactured, even twee, but never so much as to detract from what is a hard-hitting tour de force for Scottish Opera.

Ken Walton

(Picture credit: Mihaela Bodlovic)

Further performances 19 & 22 Feb in Glasgow; 27 Feb & 1 Mar in Edinburgh. Full details at www.scottishopera.org.uk

BBC SSO / Cottis

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City Halls, Glasgow

Someone at the BBC SSO has taken action against the fiasco that was its recent livestream broadcast. Thursday evening’s concert under conductor Jessica Cottis was as much a feast for the eyes as the ears. Far greater creative thought went into marrying camera angles with sound cues implicit in a musical journey that stretched from hard core American minimalism to the traditional heartland of the German Romantic symphony.

Cottis was on the podium by default, due to Israel-based Ilan Volkov’s inability to travel. But she made it entirely her own show, exerting a relaxed and confident hold over an orchestra she knows well from her time as assistant to its previous principal conductor, Sir Donald Runnicles. 

And she brought a touch of theatre to the opening minutes, facing the rear of the City Halls where the distant brass and percussion, spread over a balcony normally inhabited by audience, struck up Joan Tower’s Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman No 1 (the now 82-year-old Grammy-winning American composer wrote six of them), a quirky gender response to Aaron Copland’s more familiar Fanfare for the Common Man.

The main equivalence to Copland is the common thunderous drum opening, beyond which Tower veers off on a far less earthbound course. The textures dance, the climax is a whirlwind as ecstatic as (indeed reminiscent of) Janacek’s Sinfonietta, and the glockenspiel serves as a glittery addition of orchestral bling. This performance may have had its reticent moments, but ultimately it swelled big time and served its theatrical purpose.

Back on the main stage, the SSO strings engaged in John Adams’ Shaker Loops, which did invite the troubling question: is such raw, repetitive minimalism really what’s needed when the last thing we wish to be reminded of is the monotony of lockdown life? And this piece in particular, its persistently manic tremolando effects inspired by the frenzied rituals of the American Shaker sects, has an inbuilt tendency to set the nerves jangling. Which it did rather well. 

Yet Adams’ oscillating sound sculpture, while it starts like a rave in a beehive, is not all concentrated superheat. Yes, Cottis sourced the necessary electricity that drives the outermost movements, sometimes with pulverising persistence, always with trance-inducing focus. But she also embraced the rich mystical qualities of the second movement – Hymning Slews – its whistling harmonics, slithering motifs and altogether spookier soundscape representing a welcome respite.

In Schumann’s Second Symphony – a work remarkably positive and buoyant given the composer’s prevailing state of mind – the real thrill was to hear something approaching the full symphonic sound we’ve been missing since March. Cottis exercised a firm hand but with ample lightness of foot, so that the music’s essential solidity, while firmly rooted and warmly expressive in the weeping slow movement, had levity and sparkle conveyed through the SSO’s lithe, crisp playing, its clean textures and alert tempi.
www.bbc.co.uk/bbcsso
Ken Walton

Image: Jessica Cottis credit Kaupo Kikkas