The misogyny can’t be avoided in a libretto so fixated on women’s submission and sinful pride, but it can at least be undercut; and while James Brining’s production of The Magic Flute for Opera North trades as much in fantastical imagery as in feminism, it still does a pretty creditable job of filleting the opera’s toxic masculinity.
Not all of its shots hit their mark. The Wizard of Oz-style framing device isn’t quite sustained to the end, and there’s surely something more provocative to be done with the downfall of an otherwise nuanced Queen of the Night. But it’s gratifying to see Sarastro’s oppressive regime treated with contempt instead of reverence, and the opera’s eclectic sense of fun given so much leeway.
Canny casting of the two female leads goes a long way towards the success of this revival. Claire Lees, a member of Opera North’s chorus, is precisely the steely-willed, silvery-voiced kind of Pamina required to make Tamino’s instant infatuation plausible. And Anna Dennis brings such tremulous magnetism – and such a silken middle register – to the Queen of the Night that the notorious top Fs, albeit spot-on, are practically an afterthought.
Egor Zhuravskii is pure storybook as Tamino, all forthright tone and princely bearing. Inevitably, though, it’s Emyr Wyn Jones’s lovable rogue of a Papageno who steals the spotlight – surely channelling the spirit of librettist Emanuel Schikaneder. Msimelelo Mbali is less successful as Sarastro, however, singing with warmth but without the requisite heft, and Colin Judson’s Monostatos is never quite as vocally vivid as his lecherous stage presence promises. Among smaller roles, Andri Björn Róbertsson’s imposing Speaker is a standout, and a host of chorus members also do the company proud, especially Pasquale Orchard as a delightfully skittish Papagena.
Colin Richmond’s set and costume designs strikingly delineate the opera’s opposing worlds – whitewashed columns and red uniforms for Sarastro’s anodyne temple, giant inflatable trees and tentacles in the wilderness, and Maleficent-meets-Dietrich glamour for the Queen of the Night. Douglas O’Connell’s video designs are used effectively, too, particularly for the tricky business of Tamino and Pamina’s trials by fire and water.
Conductor Christoph Koncz leads an orchestral performance that, though well drilled, seems at times detached from the action on stage, on opening night at least: there’s a martial quality to his reading which, while suited to passages of pomp and ritual, leaves little room for light and shade. It’s a curious, hopefully temporary misstep in a production which is otherwise all about injecting colour and ambiguity into a black-and-white world.
• At the Grand theatre, Leeds, until 11 October. Then touring
