WELSH NATIONAL OPERA: THE MAGIC FLUTE

WALES MILLENNIUM CENTRE, CARDIFF (Coming to Birmingham Hippodrome May 3-5)

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An ecstatic audience virtually held the performers hostage onstage, demanding bow after bow following the most joyous and stimulating production of The Magic Flute I have ever witnessed 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, and has the opening line of the mighty concluding chorus sung by the Queen of the Night (Julia Sitkovetsky) instead of the impressively Samuel Johnsonian (he the embodiment of Enlightenment) Jonathan Lemalu. That line did not sit easily on her voice, but in the two great coloratura vengeance arias she was outstanding, clarity and precision pure and crystalline. At the opposite end of the range, he was fearless and secure.

Trystan Llyr Griffiths was 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.