Review: Magic Moments

Tuesday, 31 May 2016, 10:30 am
Article: Max Rashbrooke

The Magic Flute
New Zealand Opera
May 28 to June 4
Reviewer: Max Rashbrooke

Mozart’s The Magic Flute is an extraordinary tale, blending a story of great solemnity, of elegant music and Masonic virtue overcoming hatred and discord, with elements of extreme silliness and pure fantasy. But New Zealand Opera’s latest version, on in Wellington until Saturday and Auckland thereafter, does a very good – if not perfect – job of blending the two.

The opening scene, in which Prince Tamino is found lying in the woods, features an enormous and, I think, deliberately ludicrous puppet snake, an early signal that the production is perfectly comfortable with its more ludicrous side. Some horseplay with three handmaidens of the Queen of the Night and Prince Tamino’s own trousersnake further underlines the point.

But the opera’s core themes, the need to balance passion with wisdom and to overcome trials through strength of character, are well handled too. Mediating it all is a lovely set in which faerie tale trees double as Masonic church pillars, glowing lines in the ground denote sacred areas and running fire, and lightning crashes and thunder booms.

Sadly the singing and acting are not uniformly good. Samuel Dundas is exceptionally strong as Papageno: funny, charismatic, utterly convincing. His closing duet with Madison Nonoa’s Papagena is touching and funny and one of the opera’s highlights. The Queen of the Nights’ handmaidens sing beautifully and aren’t afraid to camp it up. And Emma Fraser, as Pamina, has a wonderful voice, supple, sweet and clear.

But others seem not quite suited to their parts. Wade Kernot has a beautiful voice in the upper ranges, and makes something stunning of the aria ‘In These Sacred Hallways’, but can’t achieve the crucial power and resonance on the low notes that one hears in, say, an Oscar Natzka recording of ‘O Isis Und Osiris’. At the other end of the scale, Ruth Jenkins-Robertsson’s high notes in the Queen of the Night’s famous aria are distinctly squeaky, rather than being the pure little bells of sound they need to be. And Randall Bills, while pleasant and capable, didn’t stun me with the beauty of his voice or, in acting terms, communicate Tamino’s transformation from headstrong youth to mature man.

The Magic Flute also presents some problems for modern audiences. In an era in which the phrase ‘mansplaining’ has entered popular vocabulary, it can be hard to hear an opera that is based on Masonic brotherhood and full of lines like, ‘You need a man to explain this to you.’ Then there’s the fact that the chief villain is, of course, someone with darker skin than the others. (However, the more overt racism of the original text has, I’m told, been softened in the modern English translation.) I suppose you can’t airbrush the past, though.

What can’t be questioned, fortunately, is Mozart’s music, which doesn’t date, and on the contrary is a delight in the competent hands of the Wellington orchestra, who after a hesitant start display the full range of tone and dynamics in a sensitive, assured performance. Whether music can triumph over everything is an open question, but it can certainly hold us spellbound.

© Scoop Media

Max Rashbrooke

Journalist

Max Rashbrooke is a journalist and author working in Wellington, New Zealand, where he writes about politics, finance and social issues.

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