Operas are like buses. Both are filled with pensioners and take ages to get anywhere, but more importantly they always seem to arrive en masse. You wait ages for a Magic Flute, then five come along at once. Opera North started us off in January, Welsh National Opera and English National Opera are currently following suit, with Scottish Opera and Glyndebourne covering the summer shift. It’s a mess and, when you consider that at least four of these are touring with inevitable overlap, a wanton, self-destructive splitting of an already small opera-going audience.
With more Flutes than a school wind-band to choose from this season you can afford to be picky (assuming you haven’t already exhausted yourself with the three concurrent Katya Kabanovas). Among so many new productions Welsh National Opera’s 15-year-old revival doesn’t seem like an obvious winner. But if Dominic Cooke’s staging is no longer the glossiest in the pack, it has something neither of its current rivals can boast: warmth.
Mozart’s Flute is famously an opera stained with racism and chauvinism, and steeped in suspicious Masonic philosophy to boot. It’s an unpalatable combination, even when washed down by such a delicious score, and one that increasingly calls directors to arms. First Netia Jones at Garsington last summer and now James Brining at Opera North have responded dutifully with earnest interrogations of sexual and social politics. Simon McBurney’s staging for English National Opera sidesteps the issues, instead dazzling the audience with visual effects, creating a show of chilly beauty and wonder. But whatever happened to the fun that originally drew Mozart’s audience out to the Viennese suburbs in such crowds?
Saturated in the hot, bright shades of Dali and peopled with Magritte-style figures and what looks like the entire props table of a surrealist’s studio, Cooke’s Flute (revived here by Caroline Chaney) arrives with a disarming grin.
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