A production of Janáček’s The Makropulos Case stands or falls by the characterisation of its protagonists. Karel Čapek’s premise – our heroine’s Elixir of Youth is coming up to the end of its 300 year period of efficacy and she has unfortunately lost the recipe – may have been brilliantly innovative, but its denouement is straightforward enough. Unless a director wishes, à la Katie Mitchell at Covent Garden, to superimpose some other narrative, the task is to make us get under the skin both of our heroine and of the people who surround her.
At Lille last night, Aušrinė Stundytė was magnetic, brilliantly depicting the way Emilia Marty’s world is closing in on her, and rendering in painfully believable detail her journey from manipulative, manic desperation to retrieve the formula to the realisation that it’s all pointless and that death would be preferable. Kornél Mundruczó’s staging played no small part in enabling the performance: his Emilia is cold, androgynous, an empty vessel into which the men around her project their desires. One step at a time, he strips her bare through the course of the opera, in a way that eschews eroticism and is simply painful to watch – the elixir administered by drip is particularly shocking.
With the exception of Robin Adams’ suavely drawn Jaroslav Prus, who retains a level of self-control, the characters around Marty are chaff, blowing in the vortex of her personality. Denys Pivnitskyi’s Albert Gregor, reliant on Marty for his inheritance but then infatuated by her, Florian Panzieri’s Janek (Prus’s son, driven to suicide by the same infatuation, Marie-Andrée Bouchard-Lesieur’s Kristina (Janek’s abandoned fiancée, also consumed by Marty) and Jan Hynk’s Kolenatý, the lawyer whose whole life is invested in the Gregor-Prus case and is befuddled by Marty’s intervention: all are depicted sensitively, credibly, fascinatingly.
Mundruczó is best known as a film director, and this production is very much in the mould of Thomas Vinterberg, whose Festen was so brilliantly turned into opera a year ago by Mark-Anthony Turnage. He springs a few surrealist cues on us – most notably during the overture, giving us a team of black space-helmeted tribunal members – but for virtually all the opera, he draws our gaze unerringly on the characters.
And that’s a perfect match for Janáček’s music, which does the same, focused as it is on their speech patterns and created from a continuous stream of splashes of bright orchestral colour. Under the baton of Dennis Russell Davies, a longtime chief conductor of the Brno Philharmonic, near the composer’s birthplace, the Orchestre National de Lille painted each of the colours with dazzling brilliance. There are few big string sweeps here, but continual handing over of the themes from woodwind to harps to percussion to small string groups or to brass – always in support of the voice.
But it’s possible to overdo the orchestral brilliance, and if the evening had an Achilles heel, it was that Russell Davies took things to excess. Tempi were brisk, with the performance clocking in more than ten minutes below the advertised time. And the orchestra was seriously loud, to a point that it all felt a little relentless. In the last third of the piece, when the action starts to get less madcap and more thoughtful, Russell Davies relaxed somewhat and allowed us to breathe: more of the same nuance would have been welcome earlier on.
Makropulos is considered a difficult opera to sing, particularly for non-native Czech speakers, which in this cast meant everyone except Hynk. You wouldn’t have known it, with complete fluency shown by all. Stundytė completely inhabited the role: so invested was one in her treatment of the character that one could almost forget the elegance of her phrasing and sweetness of her timbre. Pivnitskyi’s tenor showed plenty of brawn and a fundamentally pleasant sound; he was able to keep his head above the orchestral flood, but at the cost of some level of strain in the voice, with the same happening to a greater or lesser extent to the rest of the cast. Hynk was a notably incisive Kolenatý.
If Russell Davies can be persuaded to tone things down a bit sooner, this could become a truly exceptional production. As things stood last night, it was still an excellent exposition of an opera that poses a deep question – what meaning does life have in the absence of death – and fills one with deep sympathy for everyone on stage.
