Following acclaimed productions at Scottish Opera of The Marriage of Figaro and The Barber of Seville, recently revived, Thomas Allen returns to Glasgow to direct The Magic Flute. Taking inspiration from the city’s famed boisterous music hall history, the collections of William Hunter and his own childhood images of the shipyards on the Wear, Allen’s theme is Victorian industrial with a modern twist of steampunk.
Allen, a renowned Papageno himself, knows the work inside-out and directed with a singer’s understanding. He made this very much Papageno’s opera, and so the dapper Richard Burkhard was certainly the star turn of the evening. As the opera began the fun started as Papageno, dressed initially as a Victorian showman, pulled out a reluctant Tamino (Nicky Spence) from the audience, who protested as he was immediately bundled into his princely clothes from theatre-going attire.
Sung in English with English supertitles, the witty libretto adaptation from Kit Hesketh-Harvey kept things light and amusing, with room for modern asides to be thrown in. Nicky Spence was a more than capable Tamino with Laura Mitchell his sweetly sung Pamina.
Elsewhere, Jonathan Best’s black-gowned Sarastro, complete with dark glasses, had suitable gravitas, although his lowest notes were somewhat lost. Queen of the Night Mari Moriya, in a stunning black dress which included sparkly LED lights, has sung this famously challenging role internationally, and here she certainly hit all those top notes. The Three Ladies, also in black sparkly lit dresses, blended nicely – although Claire Watkins as First Lady deserves a prize for coping with her costume, which included a beyond shoulder-width inverted (and lit) half-moon of a hat. Another prize too for the Three Boys, completely in white, for managing to sing and hold their poses whilst being flown down in a tableau across the back of the set, each holding a white parasol with a small twirling propeller at a jaunty angle, which can’t have been easy. Making her Scottish Opera debut, Ruth Jenkins as a strongly sung Papagena was a fitting match for her Papageno.
The specially assembled chorus of Victorian industrial leaders, miners, boilermen and nurses sounded particularly thrilling. In the pit, Scottish Opera’s Mozart-sized orchestra under conductor Ekhart Wycik promised much musically with a meticulously phrased overture. He arranged his forces to produce an interesting balance, with the lower strings out in front of the conductor and first and second violins arranged either side tight to the audience; woodwind was also brought out from under the stage to give a brightness to the music, leaving the brass and Baroque timpani well under the overhang. During the performance, the two clarinets switched to basset horns to give Satastro’s music a sinister reedy edge, and Claire Haslin gave a deft performance on the keyboard glockenspiel for Papageno’s bell songs, which was just perfect, as it has to be.