Disrupt the cycle of life at your peril. Two operas written a century apart, performed last week, shout this imperative. Their perspectives appear at once contrary and unanimous. Leoš Janáček’s The Makropulos Affair (1926), staged by Scottish Opera, examines the human instinct to outwit death, via the unlikely tale of a 337-year old woman in thrall to an immortal elixir. A world premiere by Jonathan Dove, Uprising, the latest in Glyndebourne’s community opera series, addresses the survival of the planet itself, threatened by humanity’s habit of looking away.
The chance to encounter Janáček’s penultimate opera, last seen in Scotland in 2012, needs to be grabbed. Slow to be appreciated, it remains a relative rarity compared with Jenůfa and Káťa Kabanová. This co-production with Welsh National Opera – new in Cardiff in 2022 – is as good as it gets, with a characterful cast superbly directed by Olivia Fuchs, and conducted with perception and fervour by Martyn Brabbins. The Irish soprano Orla Boylan sings the mysteriously ageless Emilia Marty, in fact born Elina Makropulos more than three centuries earlier. Now on her umpteenth reinvention and name change, Marty is both an alluring grande dame and a figure of pity, especially here in Boylan’s exemplary reading. Makropulos, with an incomprehensible legal wrangle at its heart, can be thought chilly. These forces, with impassioned playing by the Orchestra of Scottish Opera, prove otherwise.
Janáček’s angular, pulsating score moves restlessly, beguiling in its whispered use of viola d’amore, toy drum, clippety percussion and ethereal string harmonics as the life-weary Marty is at last able to die. The voluptuous music of the final act comes as an urgent release, pent-up lyricism and poignancy surging forth. The swift-moving Czech text, based on a 1922 play by Karel Čapek, is now sung in English – in this opera, a wise decision. Any Czech music expert will tell you, rightly, that Janáček’s music is inseparable from the accents and rhythms of his native language. David Pountney’s crisp translation cleverly mirrors those sounds where possible, freeing the quick exchanges to sound like conversational banter (the English surtitles were hardly required, so clear was the cast’s delivery).
One other change also helped. A between-scenes attempt in this production to explain the plot by addressing the audience direct has been ditched. Instead, we hear a crackly 78 rpm on a horned gramophone play part of an unfinished Janáček symphony composed at the same period (pre-recorded by the Orchestra of Scottish Opera and then sonically manipulated). It suited the spirit of this 1920s, Hollywood glamour-style production, elegantly designed by Nicola Turner and team. The Norwegian tenor Thorbjørn Gulbrandsøy, making his Scottish Opera debut as Albert Gregor (stepping in for an indisposed Ryan Capozzo), had mastered the English text, presumably at speed. Henry Waddington, Mark Le Brocq, Catriona Hewitson, Roland Wood, Michael Lafferty and Alasdair Elliott were strikingly characterised in the numerous ensemble roles. With only four performances in total in Glasgow and Edinburgh, this production deserves more outings.
Dove’s Uprising, to a libretto by April De Angelis (who collaborated with Dove on the highly successful Flight), takes a global view of climate crisis from a teenager’s vantage point. A schoolgirl, Lola (the Welsh soprano Ffion Edwards, exuberant and intense), begins a solo school strike. Classmates first mock and bully, then join her. They become part of an international youth movement in which Greta Thunberg and eight other real-life activists make fictional appearances.
Conflict hits home. Lola’s mother (mezzo-soprano Madeleine Shaw, powerful and expressive), working for the enemy developers, arrives in the forest, in hard hat and hi-vis jacket, to fell the very trees her daughter is fighting to save. Tensions and sadnesses are acknowledged but not laboured, with enough wit to avoid piousness. A final reconciliation between mother and daughter remains uneasy and painful.
Uprising, persuasively conducted by Andrew Gourlay, directed by Sinéad O’Neill, is the latest in Glyndebourne’s community opera series, now central to the company’s year-round activities. The first, in 1990 on Hastings Pier, was also by Dove, who has a rare gift for embracing, with absolute certainty, a range of talents and ages, mixing amateurs and professionals on stage and in the orchestra. His own brand of minimalism is crafted with subtle orchestral colour, soaring vocal lines and anthemic choruses. A cast of six performed with more than 100 participants from 33 school and colleges in the Sussex region.
Among many uplifting choruses, a hymn to trees in all their variety was especially affecting, names of species recited like poetry. The opera ends with rewilding and hope, but no utopia. The environmental message, simply told, is vital, but the impact on so many young performers surely counts for yet more. A Glyndebourne supporter, the late Jim Potter, commissioned Uprising in 2020 on learning of his terminal illness. He lived to hear Dove perform some of the finished score. Glyndebourne’s community operas, always unforgettable, attract a different crowd from the illustrious summer festival. Parents, grandparents, siblings are there for the first time, or returning. This is their Glyndebourne too. Opera audiences need nurturing. As a form of propagation, it’s hard to beat.
Star ratings (out of five)
The Makropulos Affair ★★★★★
Uprising ★★★★
Uprising will be semi-staged at Saffron Hall, Saffron Walden, on 15 & 16 March, followed by concert performances at Usher Hall, Edinburgh and Glasgow Royal Concert Hall on 28 & 29 March respectively
