THE
MAGIC FLUTE
Welsh
National Opera at Wales Millennium Centre, Cardiff ****
An ecstatic audience virtually held the performers hostage
onstage on Wednesday night, demanding bow after bow following the most joyous
and stimulating production of The Magic Flute I have ever witnessed and
reviewed over a long lifetime.
Director Daisy Evans has blown away the museum dust and
returned Mozart’s opera to its pantomimic roots, providing wholly new spoken
dialogue (admittedly too much in Act II, and not always audible), laying on the
visual spectacle, and updating the topicality. That resource might not have
been to everybody’s taste, with its subtle inference of wokism, but we had here
a cultivation of mindful self-awareness differing from the Enlightenment
derived from Masonic values which were prevalent when Mozart created this
miraculous score. Evans gives us a back-story to set the context for her
reworking, and if you bring an open mind, or are seeing this opera for the
first time, it certainly works.
Evans’ concept neatly sidesteps the nowadays offensive
caricature which is the Moorish slave Monostatos, turning him instead into a
pasty-faced pedagogue boring his students in his attempt to lecture universal
knowledge into them.(Alun Rhys-Jenkins a vocally adept Oxbridge Don). Such
racial niceties had no impact on the excellent casting, thank goodness.
No pantomime would be complete without the Broker’s Men, and
here Evans gives us a duo (Thomas Kinch and Laurence Cole) hilarious in their
monstrosity as they guard Prince Tamino and birdcatcher Papageno, imprisoned as
they await their trials for admission into the Kingdom of Light. Then comes a
magical moment when those two thugs take on Mozart’s original mantle of Two
Armed Men as they sing a sturdy chorale-like melody over a striding fantasia
bass line.
Here, as throughout, Paul Daniel’s WNO Orchestra plays with
a sonority and deftness which Mozart would have loved. It was particularly
poignant to relish the keyed glockenspiel contributions which the composer
played himself early in the Flute’s original run, and later, on his deathbed,
followed in his head.
Similarly the WNO Chorus displayed its customary strength
and sensitivity in the few opportunities Mozart offers.
No spoiler alert here, but the denouement differs markedly
from Mozart’s original, entailing the opening lines of the mighty concluding
chorus being sung by a variety of
soloists.
In authentic Mozart, Julia Sitkovetsky was outstanding in
the Queen of the Night’s two great coloratura vengeance arias, clarity and
precision pure and crystalline. At the opposite end of the range, Jonathan
Lemalu was fearless and secure in the cavernous bass depths, looking for all the
world like Dr Johnson, embodiment of the Enlightenment.
Trystan Llyr Griffiths made a lyrical, appealing Tamino,
Raven McMillon a refreshingly feisty Pamina, and Quirjin de Lang’s Papageno was
charismatically delivered in both singing and speech.
But there were contributions even huger than these: the
amazingly adroit lightsaber manipulations, shaping and reflecting every facet
of the stage action (it’s all about light, after all), and the charming
manipulation of bird-puppets, whether on the hand or on extended wands, acting
like a commenting chorus, and accompanied all the while by the subtle chirping
of birdsong.
Christopher Morley