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by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, directed by Diane Paulus

Canadian Opera Company, Four Seasons Centre, Toronto

January 29-February 25, 2011

The Canadian Opera Company’s The Magic Flute, its first new production since 1993, is colourful and beautifully sung if not conceptually cohesive.  American director Diane Paulus tries to combine two ideas about Mozart’s symbolic fairy-tale opera of 1791 when choosing just one would achieve greater clarity.

Her first concept is that what we see is a play-within-a play.  During the overture, we see members of an aristocratic household preparing to stage The Magic Flute on an impromptu stage set in a garden.  Only by reading Paulus’s programme notes would you know that this is to celebrate name-day of Pamina (Isabel Bayrakdarian).  I assumed it was to celebrate her marriage.  Once the overture ends, the action unfolds on the impromptu stage watched by Pamina, the masters of the house and its servants, until one by one they are cued to join in the action.  In Act 2, Paulus abandons the first concept for her second--that the action takes place in a garden labyrinth at night as Pamina and her beloved Tamino (Michael Schade) encounter various tests as they work their way through it until dawn.  Both idea are intriguing but Paulus should really have settled on one or the other or at least created some transition between the two at the end of Act 1.  What Paulus does make very clear in both acts is how the opera represents a battle of the sexes whose extremes are represented in the darkness of the Queen of the Night (Aline Kutan) and her minions versus the light of Sarastro (Mikhail Petrenko) and his priestly order.

Renowned as a Mozart singer, Schade gives an elegant if slightly cool account of Tamino’s arias, whereas Bayrakdarian more than matches him with the unsuppressed emotion of hers.  (On February 10, 20, 23 and 25 the roles are sung by Frédéric Antoun and Simone Osborne.)  Kutan drew rapturous applause for the Queen’s hair-raising coloratura aria in Act 2, while bass Petrenko easily descended into the lowest depths of Sarastro’s calming utterances.  As Tamino’s comic companion, the bird-seller Papageno, Rodion Pogossov proved a natural comedian.  Myung Hee Cho’s designs are lovely and her creations for the dragon and other animals are wonderfully inventive.  Conductor Johannes Debus made no attempt make the COC Orchestra sound like a period instrument band.  Instead, he deliberately relates Mozart’s music forward to the 19th century.  This is an old-fashioned approach but, like playing Bach’s keyboard music on the piano, it does have its place.  Overall, doubts one may have about Paulus’s dual concepts fade in the face of the beauty of Cho’s designs and the company’s compelling music-making.        

©Christopher Hoile

Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2011-01-31.

Photo: Michael Schade and enchanted animals. ©Michael Cooper.