WNO tends not to bring its (frequent) Janáček stagings to Bristol so we braved the ‘Newport bottleneck’ on the M4 to catch their production of The Makropulos Affair at the Wales Millennium Centre. Another inter-war femme fatale who goes by lots of different names.
I think this would be on my list of underrated and underperformed operas. True, if you saw it from cold you would find the plot pretty baffling, but if you start off knowing what EM’s secret is, then you can just enjoy watching the characters tie themselves in knots (it’s hardly surprising that they can’t work out what’s going on either). I don’t think there was really a need for Vitek to break the fourth wall after Act 1 and recount again what we’d just heard about. It’s quite a wordy piece, so it’s just as well that Janáček was good at setting casual, informal dialogue to music.
The production (jointly with Scottish Opera) is lavishly staged and has the usual ravishing WNO lighting.
I won’t go on about the singing and playing, as we were happy with all of it, as were the writers of the following reviews:
Guardian
The Arts Desk
Buzz
Opera Today
Bachtrack