Mozart : The Magic Flute
Chorus
Orchestra of Scottish Opera
Eckhart Wycik
I have to admit to being more than a little ambivalent about The Magic Flute. I don't deny that it contains some of the most sublime music to grace the operatic stage, but at the same time, I think it poses almost insuperable problems to directors wishing to mount it, because the libretto is an impossible mix of profound humanism and condescending clap-trap. It gets worse - because of the amount of spoken dialogue, it's an opera that is almost always (and quite understandably) performed in translation, so one cannot take refuge in the obscurity of a foreign language. I've grown extremely chary of actually going to see the Flute, and usually prefer just to listen to a recording, however much I usually espouse live music over recorded.
Sir Thomas Allen's new production for Scottish Opera is a handsomely designed affair, set in a semi-rotunda with sliding bronze tiers accessed by spiral staircases to either side. The female chorus appeared as period nurses/nannies, while the men were either old-style miners (I was rather strongly reminded of some productions of Das Rheingold I've seen) or top-hatted, bearded Victorian gentlemen (think Isambard Kingdom Brunel). Rather regrettably, the full splendour of the Queen of the Night's dress wasn't visible until she took her bows at the end, but her ladies were extravagantly dark and spangly. One interesting idea made Monostatos not a black-face, but a mustachio-twirling, Edwardian melodrama villain with a clawed gauntlet for a left hand - when he refers to his appearance being off-putting, it was this hand that was indicated. And the one point where I laughed outright was the Dance of the Slaves, where the "miners" did a little sort of Morris Dance, with white handkerchiefs, to the sound of Papageno's magical bells, in a nod to Sir Thomas's County Durham roots
There's an additional factor that can be annoying about productions of the Flute in Britain; there is a strong tendency to reduce it to the level of pantomime, playing almost purely for laughs, and as I'm not much of a fan of pantomime in the first place, it's something I find irritating. The best production I've ever seen of Flute was also at Scottish Opera, the Jonathan Miller one from the early 80s, with its Age of Enlightenment library setting, which managed to be entertaining without giving that impression of playing to the peanut gallery. Allen's production (of which tonight was the opening night) doesn't entirely avoid this pitfall; Papageno is set up as the MC of a show that marries Victorian vaudeville to the Industrial Revolution, and is very much a stand-up comic figure, with several contemporary jokes worked into his patter, and rather heavily based on Eric Idle. Still, on the whole it was kept to a tolerable level, but at the same time, the production rarely touched any real depths of emotion. There were some nice ideas, and it was fairly coherent in concept, but little real sense of development.
Conductor Ekhart Wycik kept a firm hand on the reins with his young cast, with good tempi and phrasing, but as with the production as a whole, I found the emotional level rather detached. Laura Mitchell and Nicky Spence were a nice, but somewhat bland central pair. Richard Burkhard was kept so busy with the comic business as Papageno that when he actually sang, it was almost a surprise - I'd like to hear him in something else some day. Jonathan Best simply didn't have the lowest notes in his voice for Sarastro, which was quite a disappointment, because the voice in its upper range sounded good and authoritative. The comprimario parts were all quite adequate, but only one singer really stood out, and that was Japanese soprano Mari Moriya, as the Queen of the Night. Here was a voice with real power and colour, not to mention the agility and range for the part, and the fire and conviction to put the kind of life into her character that was somewhat lacking with the others.
[Next: 19th October]
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