The Magic Flute: A new production of Mozart staged with flair and fussiness
On a brilliantly sunny afternoon, with its commanding views of the Leicestershire countryside, there are few more alluring settings for the arts than the historic Nevill Holt estate of the controversial businessman David Ross, co-founder of Carphone Warehouse (and, for a few brief turbulent months, chairman of the Royal Opera House). In 2018, he opened a small and successful theatre in his stables to house his own opera festival, but ran into difficulties with post-Covid recovery, reducing his programme and cancelling one double bill last year as his artistic director resigned.
Now he has performed a rapid and radical pivot, with a guest director James Dacre, reworking a busy offering across the arts: part literary festival, part classical concerts, part comedy, part jazz – a considerable marketing challenge. There is just one opera production plus a new contemporary piece by Shadwell Opera; that company’s conductor Finnegan Downie Dear is the fine conductor of Mozart’s The Magic Flute – or Die Zauberflöte as we should call it, since the piece is sung in German with (largely rewritten) dialogue in English.
This is one of many slightly too clever ideas in Melly Still’s staging, which features a promising young cast hedged around by all sorts of fussy stage effects, including a forest of hanging strings plonked into heavy vases, an unwieldy children’s slide for entrances (and some exits), and a superfluous trio of irritating, writhing dancers spoiling the still moments of Mozart’s score.
Still, the essential human conflicts in the piece are given some unusual twists in Still’s seemingly Alice in Wonderland inspired narrative. This relaxed orange-suited Sarastro (Allen Michael Jones) convenes his priests in his swimming trunks and red dressing gown, and seems reconciled in the end to his furious Queen of the Night.
In this demanding role, Nazan Fikret manages the coloratura sharply, helped by a bit of rhythmic alteration; she is supported by three fluently flirty ladies in Isabelle Peters, Aina Miyagi Magnell and Angharad Lyddon. Simon Sumal is a straightforwardly dastardly Monostatos. The problem is that there are not nearly enough laughs from Jonathan Eyres’s crisply sung Papageno, and Martins Smaukstelis as Tamino is fluent but too weak: their dialogue is not well staged.
It is left to Olivia Warburton to shine as Pamina, bright and decisive, breaking the heart in her single phrase “Tamino mein” as they come together to face the trials: she is surely a voice of the future. It always seems a misreading of this opera to regard it as wholly anti-women, when Pamina and Tamino are given absolute equality in these trials by fire and water. The hot coals that here stand for fire are conventional enough, but I have never seen anything quite as comically odd as the inverted buckets over their heads that pass for trial by water.
The music is firmly steered at well-chosen tempi by Downie Dear, and he has the excellent support of the Britten Sinfonia. Most appropriately, the outstanding soloist is the flautist Thomas Hancox, flexible and expressive as he plays standing in the pit.
Until Saturday June 8; nevillholtfestival.com
