Country house opera is not all cut-glass politeness. There’s healthy subversion afoot. “Effing feminist opera directors…” muttered a traditionalist in the row behind at Garsington’s sharp new production of Die Zauberflöte (1791), directed and designed by Netia Jones, who might in fact thrill to that lively description. His grumbles, he had a few – too many intimations of equality to mention – were aimed at Papagena, the bird catcher Papageno’s soulmate, who touted an air rifle instead of the usual eye-popping cleavage. The former is probably more useful than the latter for a life in the wild.
Mozart’s final opera, despite the playful veneer some directors give it, is burdened with misogyny and an episodic plot whose riddles are never entirely solved. Jones’s production exposes the dark side but also glowingly displays Mozart’s redressing of the balance at the end. It’s one of three “last” operas in Garsington’s 2018 season, together with Richard Strauss’s Capriccio and, opening this week, Verdi’s Falstaff. A world premiere commission, The Skating Rink by David Sawer and Rory Mullarkey, completes the lineup.
Full of visual tricks, from astrolabe to iPad, CCTV to tetrahedron, this Die Zauberflöte is stuffed full of arcane masonic symbol and geometric sign as befits the text. The handsome opening scene – a white house with garden of parterres and manicured box – brings the outside in, skilfully embracing the green landscape of Garsington’s home, the Getty family’s Wormsley estate, visible through the theatre’s transparent walls as the sun goes down.
Every detail is precisely observed. The prince Tamino (Benjamin Hulett, lyrically persuasive) wrestles not with a serpent but with rubber tubing attached to an 18th-century- style electrostatic generator which leaves him unconscious. The Three Boys (Lucas Rebato, Freddie Jemison, Dionysios Sevastakis, all first rate) glide in mysteriously – their secret: roller skates – dressed in white ruffs with bobbed hair, like Goya’s child portraits. In this stylistic mix of period and modern, Sorastro and his priests wear the dark suits and ritual aprons and other regalia of Freemasonry.
His loathsome servant Monostatos, the mesmerising Adrian Thompson, powders his nose and applies lipstick, only slightly more of a molester than the touchy-feely Sorastro himself. The Queen of the Night (Sen Guo) is less a figure of terror than, in some sense, sorrow, who walks away at the end, having lost her daughter Pamina – Louise Alder, growing ever greater in vocal confidence and assurance – to her arch enemy. In Jones’s reading, the forces of darkness and light are cast with shadows. This is an ambiguous moral battle. Both sides are neutered, enlightenment questioned. It’s disturbing and truthful. The Garsington Opera orchestra showed customary finesse and energy but on second night there was some mismatch between pit and stage, as if the essential engine driving it needed more zip. Christian Curnyn, conducting, seemed to lack his usual communicative and sizzling vigour, but the ingredients are top notch.
Richard Strauss was a favourite composer of the late Leonard Ingrams, founder of Garsington, which now has a long tradition of performing the composer’s work. It showed in Tim Albery’s delicious staging of Capriccio (1941), a co-production with Santa Fe Opera, designed by Tobias Hoheisel and conducted by Garsington’s artistic director, Douglas Boyd. The work, a conversation piece about the competing powers of words and music (as silly as it sounds if taken too seriously), opens with an exquisite string sextet – expertly performed on stage – and closes with a long set piece for the Countess, whose task it is to decide the winner, only slightly swayed by the embodiment of these art forms in the shape of two ardent suitors, the composer Flamand (Sam Furness, rising to the role’s passionate challenge) and the poet Olivier (Gavan Ring, properly more circumspect and fastidious).
There was no weak link. Boyd drew ripe, voluptuous yet delicate playing from the large orchestra in a score fraught with complexity which yet must sound silken and sheer.
The set, a Bauhaus-inspired salon with an 18th-century inset alcove-stage, combined wit and elegance. The cast was outstanding, with an ensemble led by Andrew Shore looking Strauss-like as La Roche, William Dazeley as the feckless Count, Graham Clark as Monsieur Taupe and, superbly funny and characterful, Hanna Hipp as the actress Clairon. The great coup was the Countess herself, the much-loved Swedish soprano Miah Persson, singing the role for the first time, with beauty of tone, subtlety of vocal colour and that ideal, Straussian blend of wit, consternation and wisdom.
Star ratings (out of 5)
Die Zauberflöte ★★★★
Capriccio ★★★★★
- Die Zauberflöte and Capriccio are in rep at Garsington Opera at Wormsley, Bucks, until 21 July and 28 June respectively
