Come June, Martyn Brabbins will be directing the orchestra of English National Opera in David Pountney’s new production of Tchaikovsky’s Mazeppa, a story of wartime Ukraine, at Grange Park in Surrey. Brabbins, who resigned his position as music director of ENO in October 2023, has, however, chosen to make his first return to the pit with Scottish Opera, making his company debut with a score he had not previously studied, Janáček’s The Makropulos Affair.
The result is a triumph, his immaculate pacing of the music and the sparkling detail in the playing crucial to the gripping storytelling of Olivia Fuchs’ production. With three striking sets for each of the three acts by Nicola Turner, beautifully lit by Robbie Butler, and video by Sam Sharples in the style of early 20th century experimental cinema, this staging was seen at WNO in Cardiff three years ago, but the Scottish premiere of this co-production, with a fresh cast, uses Pountney’s English translation of the libretto, sung so clearly that the surtitles are almost superfluous.
At the heart of the compelling narrative is a riveting performance from Irish soprano Orla Boylan, following up her acclaimed Scottish Opera turn as Jenny Marx in Jonathan Dove’s Marx in London! Her chain-smoking, hipflask-toting opera diva, Emilia Marty, is uncaringly indestructible because an elixir has kept her alive since 1575 under various aliases, but always with the initials EM.
Around her circle besotted men, company stalwarts Roland Wood as Baron Prus and Alasdair Elliot as Count Hauk-Šendorf and debuts from tenors Ryan Capozzo as Albert Gregor and Michael Lafferty as the Baron’s impressionable son Janek. Mark Le Brocq, as legal clerk Vítek, and Catriona Hewitson as his opera-singer daughter, Kristina, draw the audience into the tale with their characterful performances, and the young soprano is a crucial presence throughout, even in scenes where she has little to sing.
Those include the introduction of a clever interlude between Act 1 and 2 that uses a recording of Janáček’s The Danube as part of the period meta-theatricality essential to both the opera itself and to this production. The combination of the wit of those ingredients, and some much broader humour, with the authority of the orchestral work, culminating in the achingly moving finale as Marty embraces death, is quite remarkable – and makes an unanswerable case for the century-old Makropulos as the most contemporary of Janáček’s operas.
