The orbs have been re-lit and the falcon booked, the monumental masonry slotted back into place and the flying contraption (part Wright brothers prototype, part Victorian perambulator) commandeered by another three boys. Twenty two years since its debut, with revivals now in double figures, David McVicar’s production of The Magic Flute is back, overseen by revival director Ruth Knight.
The lighting is as beautiful as ever: there’s no mistaking the Enlightenment’s visual metaphors here. Notwithstanding a technical hitch that delayed the start of act two on opening night, the opera’s sequence of mysterious non-places glides along, dreamlike and atmospheric. The opera has long outlived its genre of Singspiel – a kind of 18th-century musical – and its edutainment moralising unavoidably harks back to another age. Whether you agree with the programme that an opera insisting that women always need male guidance is “very suitable for children” will depend on your parenting style. But it’s hard to imagine the plot making more sense in the 21st century than it does in McVicar’s hands.
This revival is also a lot of fun, weaving a vital thread of panto-ready physical comedy through the earnest lessons of Sarastro and his pseudo-masonic initiates. The German dialogue is so fluently delivered you’ll overlook the absurdity of a London audience listening to a non-German cast chattering auf Deutsch. The opera’s “noble” couple of Tamino and Pamina can be a bore – all head prefect goody-goody – but Amitai Pati and Lucy Crowe were far too vivacious for that. Crowe sparkled from the get-go, her tone warm, her phrasing exquisitely controlled. Pati (the brother of acclaimed Samoan-born tenor Pene) gleamed heroically up top yet blended sensitively in the various ensembles: an extremely fine Royal Opera debut.
Steely soprano … Kathryn Lewek as the Queen Of The Night. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian
Huw Montague Rendall is a born Papageno, sympathetic as he struts and strops, his singing easy, his comic timing acute. Gerhard Siegel’s Monostatos (the character stripped of its most explicit racism) was a thoroughly kitsch baddie, while Kathryn Lewek was a relatively un-histrionic Queen of the Night, her soprano steely and laser-accurate, the leaps of her most famous aria ringing out, bell-like. As Sarastro, Soloman Howard had easy authority, his high register sumptuous, his lowest notes dense velvet. The three boys boasted exceptional intonation and angelic tone; the three ladies agile, luminous ensemble singing.
Holding it all together with an utterly musical, utterly assured sense of pace, was young French conductor Marie Jacquot. She drew ultra-stylish playing from the orchestra: tutti heft remained translucent, chorale passages were sublimely well-tuned, solos artfully sculpted. At one point her hand shot up, releasing the end of a phrase as if she’d been grasping it in her fist, such was her intimate involvement with the music. Remember Jacquot’s name: this Royal Opera debut suggests we’ll be needing it.
