You’ll shriek . . . but not with laughter
Die Zauberflöte (Glyndebourne Festival Opera) Verdict: Too jokey by far ★★✩✩✩
THIS house, which once gave us a Rameau opera set in a fridge, now locates Mozart’s Magic Flute in a
fin de siecle hotel, with the solemn high priest Sarastro as chef de
cuisine and the chorus of priests as pastry cooks.
Some of the wizard wheezes are funny, especially Patrick Martel’s puppets, but most misfire: the production team, Barbe & Doucet, constantly nudge us in the ribs, often while some poor singer is trying to perform sublime music.
The first-night audience loved it, but I fear those who cherish this most original of Mozart’s final works will find it a sacrilege.
I cannot take it seriously when Sofia Fomina as Pamina reminds me of Dorothy in The Wizard Of Oz and David Portillo as Tamino is in plus-fours, carrying a shotgun. A group of suffragettes with banners crossing the stage is just a cheap laugh.
In another setting, that natural comedian Björn Bürger would be ideal as birdcatcher Papageno. We know Brindley Sherratt’s noble Sarastro from Covent Garden, but an illuminated chef’s hat demeans him. Jörg Schneider as Monostatos brings to mind Alfred P. Doolittle in My Fair Lady.
Allowing Caroline Wettergreen as the Queen of the Night to shriek an octave higher at the end of her first aria is just one of conductor Ryan Wigglesworth’s sins — no wonder she sounds hoarse and out of tune later.
The ‘ tempo giusto’ seems beyond Wigglesworth, whose direction is now too slow, now too fast, now too jerky and staccato. The Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment woodwinds sound nice, but the strings are weedy.
With the Three Ladies in caps and aprons, the Three Boys as bellhops and the chorus misguidedly including a dwarf, this expensively mounted absurdity should be sent for landfill without delay.
As the great Swiss conductor Ernest Ansermet once told a rowdy London orchestra: ‘Gentlemen, a joke then and now yes very sometimes, but always by God never!’