FOR a demanding work by Opera North fave Janácek, the Royal was eerily busy with young people.
In opera audience terms, this can apply to anyone under 40, but no, there were actual teenagers, in groups.
We were caught twixt a vampire-like desire to make the transition to a lifelong love of high culture smooth and the sinking dread they would behave badly. More of them later.
The Makropulos Case is a fascinating work. Adapted in the 1920s from a Czech play, it deals, as the other works have this season, with mortality.
In this, our enigmatic heroine Emilia Marty, an ice-cold man-eating opera singer, turns up in a solicitor’s office with some unnervingly accurate information about a case which has dragged for nearly 100 years.
As the story develops, we realise this ‘30-something’ is actually 30-odd decades, not years, old. This work is a closely-focussed treatise on what an abnormally-long life would do to one and is rather anti-immortality, in the end. It is also refreshingly short.
Ylva Kihlberg makes her debut as Emilia Marty. It is a fascinating role, as Marty rapidly ages and undergoes some creepy tranformations.
Kihlberg is utterly seductive and bewitching. Paul Nilon is a fine-voiced (as ever!) freaky, geeky Gregor, a character who is caught up in the case and falls in love with her (along with all other male characters) unaware she’s his great-great grandma, or something. Yuk.
YIva looks fabulous, thanks to the teamwork of Director Tom Cairns and Set/Costume Designer Hildegard Bechtler. The look is 50s, with some awesome transformations of the set. This and the thoughtful piece almost fool you you’re in an arthouse cinema. The music, a backdrop, isn’t exactly singalong, more a changing soundscape.
The young ‘uns behaved impeccably. Sure some of them came dolled up for some night in a Las Vegas casino and sniggered sweetly at a bedroom scene, but opera must find new fresh blood for its audiences.
Because none of us will live forever.
