Edinburgh Festival 2012: The Makropulos Case, at Festival Theatre – Seven magazine review

Boasting one of its strongest music programmes in recent years, the Edinburgh International Festival (to Sept 2; www.eif.co.uk) is showing little inclination to put its feet up as it turns 65 this summer.

On the contrary, both the big opening events were works that challenge accepted notions of mortality: Delius’s Nietzsche-inspired A Mass of Life and Janácek’s operatic fantasy about a 337-year-old diva, heroine of The Makropulos Case.

Opera North’s first-ever Makropulos plays the strange work relatively straight. There is already enough surrealism in the Karel Capek play on which it is based – a story of the centuries-old Elina Makropulos, whom we meet in her final incarnation as the opera singer Emilia Marty – to make extra interpretative layers superfluous, and Tom Cairns’s fine production simply moves things forward from the time of composition (1926) to the Fifties.

Czech architectural detail leaves its mark on Hildegard Bechtler’s flexible designs, but more glamorous costumes might help Ylva Kihlberg in the title part. The Danish soprano has some of the vocal steel required but is unremarkable, lacking that air of mysterious, burnt-out beauty in a role usually favoured by divas at career twilight.

But this only makes an already strong cast – including Paul Nilon as Albert Gregor, Robert Hayward as Jaroslav Prus and Nigel Robson as Hauk-Sendorf – seem outstanding.

From the fierce, throbbing start to the soaring final pages, and with a vitality that never drowns his singers, the conductor Richard Farnes gives us one of the great musical accounts of Janácek’s penultimate opera.

'The Makropulos Case' tours to Nov 22; www.operanorth.co.uk

This review also appeared in SEVEN magazine, free with the Sunday Telegraph

Follow SEVEN on Twitter @TelegraphSeven