The Royal Opera House’s Linbury Studio is home to all sorts of intriguing operatic experiments, and the most eye-catching entry in the new season is undoubtedly ‘Last Days’, which is indeed an opera adaptation of Gus Van Sant’s gruelling, impressionistic film inspired by the final days in the life of grunge icon Kurt Cobain (though the lead character is actually a guy called Blake with a functionally identical life to the Nirvana frontman). With music by Oliver Leith and Libretto by Matt Copson, there are clearly quite a lot of questions to be asked about this project: will it feature a singer with unkept blonde hair, plaid shirt and sunnies? Will the music make any nod towards Nirvana’s explosively metallic sound? How much singing will there even be, given that the film is virtually wordless, and having Blake sing about what’s on his mind would clearly undermine the vibe of the source material? We’ll find out in the autumn.
Tickets will go on sale July 27.