This lively production of Mozart’s Magic Flute opens Opera North’s 2024/25 season. First seen in 2019, it looks great and it tells most of the story with admirable clarity. There are some outstanding performances and it sounds wonderful in the marvellous setting of Leeds Grand Theatre with its warm and welcoming acoustic. So why does it just miss out on five stars? Perhaps because the production avoids facing up to some of the difficult aspects of the libretto and, as a result, the ending feels more like a coup d’etat than the transfer of power from the patriarchy to a new enlightened world order.
Pamina, the daughter of the Queen of the Night, has been abducted by Sarastro, High Priest of a sun-worshipping community/cult. The queen recruits Prince Tamino to rescue her and provides him with a magic flute and a strangely inappropriate companion, Papageno the bird-catcher. When they arrive at Sarastro’s palace, Tamino finds that not everything is quite as the queen has described it. He is eventually persuaded that, to gain Pamina’s hand and in pursuit of wisdom and virtue, he should seek membership of the cult and should undergo a series of trials. Papageno just wants someone to love and refuses to see why he needs to undertake dangerous tests to find his Papagena. After overcoming the trials, Tamino and Pamina are jointly acclaimed as the new leaders of Sarastro’s community.
There are some great performances in the show. As is often the case, Papageno steals the limelight – perhaps as Schikaneder did at the premier in Vienna in 1791? Emyr Wyn Jones’ portrayal of the ‘everyman’ bird-catcher is warm-hearted and genuinely comic. He has a rich and fruity baritone voice and he catches that fine line between ‘out-of-his-depth’ and ‘clever moves to keep his head above water’ beautifully. So, of course, he has won the sympathy of the audience long before he wins his reward and meets his Papagena, a lovely cameo from Pasquale Orchard, a member of the Opera North Chorus. None of this is to downplay the quality of the Tamino and Pamina who are both top notch. Egor Zhuravskii is a fine Tamino – his high sweet tenor doing justice to the delicacy of Mozart’s music and particularly affecting when he floats the high notes of “dies bildnis ist besaubernd schon”, the aria he sings when he gazes at the portrait of Pamina for the first time. Claire Lees is his well matched Pamina, a woman of spirit (as all Paminas are nowadays) Another ‘graduate’ from the chorus of Opera North, she has all the vocal heft needed for the role and negotiates her way through the conflicting perils of her loyalty to her mother and her love for Tamino with real dramatic impact.
The Queen of the Night has little to do other than look wicked and belt out two stratospheric arias – if it is fair to use the phrase “little to do” about two of the most celebrated soprano arias in the operatic cannon. Whatever …. Anna Dennis meets both challenges, the music and the wickedness, with aplomb. Msimelelo Mbali is an effective Sarastro but perhaps a little light on the bass power needed for the challenging arias in which he tries to explain the purposes of his cult. There was not a weak link anywhere in the many small supporting roles. And the orchestra and chorus, under the baton of Christoph Koncz, were of the usual high standard one expects from Opera North.
I am ambivalent about director James Brining’s concept for the piece. It looks good and the huge movable walls and doors offer a fast and efficient way of changing scenes. But the red uniforms worn by the members of Sarastro’s supporters don’t help to tell the whole story of the male supremacist logic of his cult, even though the women look a bit like Attwood’s handmaids – and Sarastro’s ‘tinpot dictator’ uniform looked out of place. And if the followers of the Queen were to represent a world where emotion and not cold reason held sway, why were her ladies in costumes that made them look like they were fresh from a bloody field hospital in the Great War.
There are lots more questions that are raised by this production of The Magic Flute – no time to address them all here. But in the end this marvellous opera – so much more than the populist pantomime it is sometimes labelled – deserves to be enjoyed on its own terms at the opera house and argued over at length in the bar afterwards. This Opera North production offers both pleasures in abundance – a delight.
Composer: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Libretto: Emanuel Schikaneder
Conductor: Christoph Koncz
Director: James Brining
Performers incl: Egor Zhuravskii, Claire Lees, Emyr Wyn Jones, Anna Dennis
Running time: 2 hrs 55 Mins
Date: various venues, until 23 November, 2024