Richard Bratby

The big chill | 7 June 2018

Plus: an impressive Mahler 7 from Kirill Petrenko and the Bavarian State Orchestra, and he seemed admirably uninterested in the audience

The picnic hamper’s open, the bubbly is chilled, and country house opera is starting to eat itself. When you arrive at the Wormsley Estate you enter a fantastic, baffling world. Figures in black tie stroll between topiary hedges in obedience to unstated rules, while serving staff hover a few paces behind, gliding silently in to reassert neatness and order. Children dressed in red (they’re from a local Scout group) pop up to help and guide. Then the new production of Die Zauberflöte begins and with a deft, surreal spin, the director Netia Jones bowls it all straight back at you.

That’s a big part of the fun here. Jones has designed the production herself, and she clearly has quite a DVD collection. Act One resembles The Draughtsman’s Contract, complete with box hedges and symbolic geometrical forms, though surveillance cameras cluster, dove-like, on a Georgian façade. Act Two is set in the Red Room from Twin Peaks, with a few quotes from The Handmaid’s Tale. Jones moves her characters across Garsington Opera’s wide stage like pieces in a puzzle, dressed in crisp blacks, whites and reds, and surrounded by inventive details. The Three Boys whizz about on roller skates, Tamino (Benjamin Hulett) and Pamina (Louise Alder) are straight out of the Boden catalogue, while the gamekeeper Papageno (Jonathan McGovern) spoils the upmarket idyll by wringing the neck of a luckless crow.

This is a smashing cast: fresh-sounding, and each bringing slightly more to the table, vocally, than you necessarily expect with a Zauberflöte. Hulett’s voice has a heroic ring, and McGovern is one of the most purely lyrical Papagenos I’ve heard, layering tenderness on top of his grubby, put-upon characterisation. Alder’s Pamina approached him with compassion, and found a new shade of tone and meaning in each phrase of her ‘Ach, ich fühl’s’ (amazingly, she’s also in the middle of a run as Sophie in Der Rosenkavalier at Glyndebourne).

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