Sarastro gets a sympathy laugh

Wow! Thomas Oliemans as Papageno.
(All photos courtesy of ENO, (c) Donald Cooper)

It's not every day that Sarastro announces "This is the most important assembly we've ever held - the decision we are about to make is of grave importance" - only to find half the audience giving him a belly-laugh. But then, it's not every day that The Magic Flute feels so relevant to our needs that the whole of the House of Commons should be frogmarched into the Coliseum and made to study every word of it. This Magic Flute has got...bells.

ENO's production by Simon McBurney is back for another revival, and gosh, it's just better and better: the storytelling could not be clearer, nor the inventiveness, nor the meaning. In Mozart and Schikaneder's Enlightenment fairytale, wisdom, truth and love battle against the forces of darkness – lies, ignorance, superstition, vengeance, violence. (Sounds familiar?) And the forces of good triumph. (Yes!) Along the way, in their quest, the young couple Tamino and Pamina are tested to their limits, and protected by their steadfast devotion to each other and the power of their music. (Double yes!)

The Magic Flute in person, with attendant bird action

The ingenious designs by Michael Levine turn the spines of books into pillars of the temple of wisdom, and Papageno's birds are their fluttering, faithful leaves. Wisdom, enlightenment itself, comes through studiousness, learning, books, self-discipline, the embrace of art and culture. The transformative effect of music saves Tamino and Pamina's lives and Papageno's too. There is something uniquely moving about a work by one of the greatest musical geniuses who ever lived that pays such a direct tribute to the art to which he devoted his short life.

The Magic Flute is open to infinite numbers of interpretation and reinterpretation, but McBurney's is the only production I've seen in which the emotional climax - the tests of Fire and Water - actually are frightening: an extended, roaring engulfment of flames followed by a magical flood in which Tamino and Pamina must swim for the spiralling surface. There's magic and whimsy aplenty - the sets are live-drawn, the sound-effects produced by a Foley artist in real time (she even has to dodge the attentions of Papageno), and the prince and Papageno are respectively attended by the orchestra's flautist and keyboard player, trotting up from the pit when needed - until Papageno learns to play his own bells.

Rupert Charlesworth (Tamino) and Lucy Crowe (Pamina) swim for their lives

For this revival the musical performance is a little uneven, but chiefly splendid: Lucy Crowe's Pamina brought a blazing emotional gravitas, Thomas Olieman's Papageno a grumpy yet irresistible charm. Brindley Sherratt's Sarastro simply couldn't be bettered (and, um, I think he was speaking those crucial lines perhaps not 100% "in character" which, under the circumstances, is fine with me). Julia Bauer's Queen of the Night delivered her arias with a concentrated punch of energy, making up in scariness for anything lacking in projection. Rupert Charlesworth as Tamino was slightly the opposite, with a powerful tone that nevertheless did not fully bloom into the sort of open generosity one might long for at the top. The Three Ladies had luxury casting in Susanna Hurrell, Samantha Price and Katie Stevenson, Daniel Norman was a splendid Monostatos and Rowan Pierce's Papagena so appealing that you'd wish her to have a great deal more to sing.

Ben Gernon's conducting felt a little hard-driven and businesslike, at least in the first half; there was sometimes too little space for the music to breathe and it seemed to lack the sense of lightness and air that can add the final touch of Mozartian warmth; but in the second half, Papageno's high comedy with the tuned wine bottles and Lucy Crowe's heartbreak aria oddly enough sorted things out as if simply through the power of Mozart himself. And the upside of the briskness is that the drama does bowl along, keeping you on the edge of your seat all the way through.

The performance was dedicated - as McBurney announced at the end - to the memory of its translator, Stephen Jeffreys, who died last autumn. His English version sparkles and twists and shines.

And did we come out of the Coliseum to find that wisdom had prevailed down the road in Westminster? Not quite - and yet, there's progress. Perhaps a parliament trip to this show might help them put the final pieces into place to save us all from the forces of darkness...

Go see. You'll laugh and cry. https://www.eno.org/whats-on/the-magic-flute/

McBurney's Mozart is a Flute for our times

Before we get down to business with Simon McBurney's production of The Magic Flute, here's 2 1/2p about opera in translation. The raison d'etre of ENO is to perform opera in the vernacular. But London today is such a cosmopolitan city that the concept is starting to look outdated. Yesterday The Magic Flute was in English; but the main language in the foyer seemed to be Hungarian.

That was because the holder of ENO's Mackerras Conducting Fellowship was on the podium for a performance for the first time: Gergely Madaras, 28, from Budapest. He has been working at ENO alongside Ed Gardner, being mentored and nurtured. Perhaps The Magic Flute isn't an ideal debut opera - but his conducting was full of vim and whoosh, extremely alive, well-balanced and tender-hearted. It took a little while to "settle" - there were one or two little disagreements over tempo between pit and stage, and a few moments needed a tad more time to breathe. But that will go, in due course, and on the whole Madaras seems a careful accompanist and a fine, full-spirited musician. I look forward to hearing more of him.

So to Flute - a production on which many expectations hang, since it replaces Nicholas Hytner's classic of 25 years or more. It could scarcely be more different. And it could scarcely be more enchanting, more contemporary, more inspired. Flute has been my most-loved opera since childhood, yet I found things in it yesterday that I've never seen or heard before, in the best possible way.

It has been described as the most demanding production ENO has yet staged. Sometimes its effects are stunning: the writhing snake that attacks Tamino is filmed and projected around him; and during the trials the prince and princess swim through a mid-air, hand-drawn spiral, as if starring in Titanic (above). The Temple of Reason emerges from a shelf of giant books; their pages become Papageno's fluttering birds, wielded by 14 actors (below). The Queen of the Night - confined for much of the show to a wheelchair - sings amid a breathing, trembling aura of stars. Moreover, much action takes place on a platform that swings, dips and tips, leaving the singers to balance, pace, slide when necessary and, of course, sing some jolly demanding music throughout - which they managed without the merest flinch.

McBurney was new to opera when he directed the massively successful A Dog's Heart for ENO a few years ago; this is his first classic. A fascinating interview in The Guardian makes the following suggestion: "I want...to take the audience from darkness to light, to make us evolve, to end mystification and embrace reason and rationality. That, as I understand it, is what the opera is about."

It is indeed, and McBurney's staging makes its message one for today, "relevant" in a way that is revelatory and profound rather than contrived. Indeed, we've rarely needed that message as much as we do now. It's as if Mozart himself is speaking to us as spiritual leader, as prophet.

The opera has been divested of its racism and as much of its sexism as possible, and - dare I say - is the better for it. The world that the characters move in is profoundly dangerous, riven by war, delusion, superstition; the plea is for wisdom, love, enlightenment. Everything feels here and now; the crisis of humanity of which Sarastro speaks is our own; everything seems real, the more apparently illogical the truer to life - and, moreover, true to the timeless heart of Mozart's vision.

[Dear Simon, please will you do Parsifal next, then the Ring cycle? Lots of love, Jess x.] 

In this process of "becoming"; everyone evolves, not only Tamino in his quest for initiation or Pamina in her growth from projected image - literally shining onto Tamino's heart while he sings his great aria - to mature and devoted woman. The magic instruments are played by members of the orchestra, the flautist walking on stage to stand alongside Tamino, the magic bells rendered on a keyboard from a corner of the pit where Papageno can interact suitably (the orchestra is raised so that it is just a notch below the stage).

But Papageno gradually learns to play them himself. Unpacking his parcel of food and wine, he creates a row of bottles which he empties - and in one case, er, fills - to reach the right pitch, and uses them to accompany the start of 'Ein mädchen oder weibchen'. "My old friend Chateauneuf du Pape..." he quips, then wonders if his "friend"'s family is present. Sure enough, inside the basket he finds more bottles. "Ahh, here's Auntie Angela and Uncle Roberto. Better keep those two apart!" - with which he places them at either end of the row. (Apologies to my neighbours in the theatre - I may have squawked...) Anyhow, by the time we get to 'Klinge, glöckchen, klinge', Papageno can tickle the ivories perfectly well and the keyboard player, striding on stage to be his sidekick, is put out to find her services aren't required.

Major plaudits to a terrific cast. Ben Johnson is a superb Tamino - his voice better suited to this role than it was to Alfredo in La Traviata - open-toned, focused and deeply musical. Devon Guthrie's feisty, heart-breaking Pamina matched him turn for turn. Roland Wood's Papageno - from Blackburn? - was a delight. McBurney has him carting a ladder around and from time to time he climbs it to escape something that alarms him, as if fleeing from a mouse. The introduction of a cuckoo noise into his first aria is naughty and rather delicious. James Creswell is an ideal Sarastro and Cornelia Götz a mostly strong Queen of the Night - and I love it that she is redeemed at the conclusion. Pamina doesn't often get her mother back.

Just one other perennial bugbear. The orchestra plays in that contemporary, standardised, "listen!-we-play-18th-century-music-without-vibrato" sound that always has been at odds with that of the human voice, and will always remain so.

In 100 years' time, assuming anyone still remembers who Mozart was, some scholar, assuming scholars still exist, may undertake a research project, assuming research still exists, about The Magic Flute. Of course they will be shocked to see the long hushed-up original text. But where the music is concerned, they might try a daring experiment: have the strings play with vibrato, just once, just to see what happens. And they will be astonished by how beautiful it sounds. And they will look at our generations' reasons for stopping the vibrato. And they will laugh.