The Magic Flute
Welsh National Opera, Cardiff

WELSH National Opera’s new production of Mozart’s The Magic Flute is a lovely addition to the company’s repertoire and will bring joy to audiences of all ages.

Director Daisy Evans has a sure touch for comedy and sympathetically highlights the singers during their key arias.

What Evans has done is to lose some of the opera’s misogynist elements and refocus it away from the mysticism and romanticism of freemasonry.

Mozart’s most compelling characters in this opera are the women, and he certainly wrote some cracking arias for them.

The Queen of the Night for the premiere was sung by Julia Sitkovetsky who brought bucket-loads of menace to her performance.

But all Queens in this opera are judged on one of opera’s most famous and difficult arias for sopranos in Der Hoelle Rache (“Hell’s vengeance boils in my heart”), and Sitkovetsky was sublime.

Mozart wrote the aria for his sister-in-law, Josepha Hofer, for the original production in 1791. Some 230 years later it is still a spine-tingling moment for audiences.

Trystan Llyr Griffiths brings Tamino to life but as a slightly lacklustre prince on a quest.

The Queen of the Night gives Tamino the mission to rescue her daughter Pamina, sung by Raven McMillon as a ballsy heroine who probably did not need rescuing by a mere man.

The opera really comes to life with the three lascivious ladies of the queen pawing a sleeping Tamino and singing suggestively of their longing to wake him properly.

Nazan Fikret, Kezia Bienek and Claire Barnett-Jones play the three ladies with enough comedy but without any crudity.

Evans has finessed and highlighted the differences between the realms of the Queen of the Night and Sarastro, sung by Jonathan Lemalu, into a simple but engaging battle.

Night-time is a place for imagination, freedom of thought and fantasy, whereas the day-time realm is a place of logic, rationality and reason.

This simple idea enables Evans to strip out the elements of racism, misogyny and freemasonry without losing the core plot of the battle between the two competing realms.

Of course, it all works out in the end but this most ridiculous of art forms requires the journey to transport us through Mozart’s sublime music and singing.

The WNO is to be congratulated for this production and for pricing the tickets so that ordinary folk can attend — tickets for under-16s are £5 when accompanied by a full-price adult.

Opera can too often be a plaything of the middle classes and the wealthy, and the dress code is usually the uniform by which ordinary folk are made to feel excluded.

The audience in Cardiff Bay for the opening night were dressed for comfort and against the weather and nobody need feel excluded to enjoy a magical The Magic Flute.

Tours England and Wales until May 27, box office: 029 2063-5000, wno.org.uk.