Die Zauberflote Komische Oper Berlin
Feb 15th 2020
A number of people have said with my reviews that I am always passionately enthusiastic about all I see. Well, not wholly true and I do choose carefully what I go to see, although I have seen some horrors.
But with this I am going to be perhaps more than usually hyperbolic. I cannot now imagine seeing any Zauberflote production that is as good, as satisfying, as funny, as touching, as wholly understanding and doing justice to every single aspect of it, as this deservedly famous production. It’s the same reaction I have with Mathew Bourne’s Swan Lake; his is the ONLY way to do it.
The action is played out in front of a white screen upon which an extraordinary rage of cute/funny/scary images are projected and with whom and around whom the singers all act and react. Interestingly, for much of the time they are pretty static on stage (necessarily) I think this may well have had a beneficial effect in allowing them to focus on singing and not have to deal with complicated stage movements such as having to carry a puppet representation of oneself for much of the performance as was the case in the recent Salome at Theatre an den Wien. (See my review on this site for more about that one).
The images are always perfectly suited to the drama and mood and marvelously balance playfulness and seriousness which is difficult to bring off in this work; it can seem something of a mishmash of pantomime silliness and high-minded drama which do not always meld well or where one aspect dominates at the expense of the other. The greatest strength of this production was that the creators managed to meld these two elements perfectly. The Queen of the Night (whose face was the only part visible) was a vast spider and Papageno, in a vivid yellow-green suit had marvelously comic animated sidekick of a cat (as a bird catcher would, of course!) and I swear that in one scene when the cat was chasing some birds, when it had caught one, it winked at the audience!
For Sarastro, the temple was intially suggested by projected drawings of mechanical contrivances, strongly recalling Leonardo da Vinci’s drawings (perhaps they were; I was not sure) and all the creatures that were a part of this world of reason were animated mechanical figures – and smart funny and wholly appropriate to show the use of reason and thought. And if I have not made clear there were no three-dimensional figures other than the singer seen on the stage.
Thanks to all this imaginative creativity I definitely had a smile on my face for the whole of the first Act as one gem of an idea after another was revealed – and the same happened with Act 2. Of the many, many glorious details, one of the funniest for me were the bells of Papageno – dancing legs with red ballet shoes on which, when their music started was perfect for all scenes in which they appeared – particularly with Monastatos! All these visuals added to the jusci and took kthiong away.
Musically it was a superb performance and particular mention must be made of the very sweet-voiced Tamino of Tansel Akzeybek, the spectacular Queen of the Night of Aleksandra Olczyk who managed a sustained high f’’ in her first aria and, most of all, a stunning Pamina by Vera-Lotte Boecker. A wonderful creamy tone with superb control but a larger voice than one often hears. This was NOT any sort of disadvantage as it was absolutely right in this performance but it would be interesting to hear here in other roles. It seemed like a voice that would not be confined to Mozart roles.
So an utterly magical evening of music and theatre where the two parts were in perfect harmony. See this if you get a chance. It has toured (I believe even to Budapest) and am sure it will continue to do so.