Self-belief, urgent and impassioned, burst forth from Welsh National Opera’s new staging of Leoš Janáček’s The Makropulos Affair (1926), directed by Olivia Fuchs and conducted by Tomáš Hanus. Confidence is the elusive key to any performance, the magnet that draws you in. We may expect it from a professional opera company, but Janáček’s penultimate opera lays every obstacle in its path, from complications with the source material, to the text-heavy Czech libretto, to the nature of the opera itself.
WNO, however, is a company immersed in this composer, through recent exposure – lately, Jenůfa and The Cunning Little Vixen – and through history. The Janáček pioneer Charles Mackerras was a one-time WNO music director. The current holder of the post, Hanus, was born in Brno in the Czech Republic, the town where Janáček spent most of his life. Hanus worked on the new critical edition of Makropulos used here. No one can capture more accurately the accents and inflections of this music. A living performance tradition runs through WNO’s collective veins.
