The idea is legitimate and in keeping with the overall concept, but it has a chilly effect. The production’s most radical intervention is to remove the opera’s dialogue and replace it with cleverly rendered intertitles - underscored, as if at a silent film, by excerpts from two of Mozart’s keyboard fantasias. There is a steady influx of new images, from the solemn parade of mechanical animals in front of Sarastro’s temple to the flowers that grow when Pamina waters the ground with Papageno’s tears during their duet, “Bei Männern welche Liebe fühlen.” Fetching men and women, representing the mates for whom the singers long, emerge from the blooms.īut I agreed with my guest at the performance when she said, joking only a little, that Papageno’s cat was the only character with which she felt an emotional connection. Few things tend to get stale more quickly than animated projections, but this production stays miraculously fresh, sustaining surprise and delight in its two and a half hours. This new “Flute” shows that the results can be worth the rush and risk. Companies should be eagerly looking for new singers and stagings that can be presented in a matter of months rather than years. But the Los Angeles Opera’s late switch - this new “Flute” was not officially announced until June - should be a positive example for the opera world, where artistic choices can be encased in amber up to five years in advance. While it’s not unheard-of for a theater to change productions with little time to spare, it’s usually an unhappy necessity rather than a deliberate choice. The enterprising Minnesota Opera was already interested in the show, so the two companies joined forces - and budgets - to bring it to America it opens in Minnesota in April. He got James Conlon, the music director here and the “Flute” conductor, and Plácido Domingo, the general manager, on board. “It felt like it would be a terrible missed opportunity if we didn’t pursue it,” he said. Koelsch was tipped off to the Berlin version and traveled there to see it in January, where he became convinced it was right for his company. The Los Angeles Opera had scheduled a fifth revival of its well-liked 1993 Peter Hall production of “The Magic Flute.” But Mr. This time last year, there were no plans to bring it here. (If you know the classic Disney short “The Skeleton Dance,” you get the idea.)
LA OPERA THE MAGIC FLUTE FULL
Both the humor and seriousness of “The Magic Flute” are done full justice by the production’s gleefully yet gently macabre aesthetic. So clever is the concept, by Suzanne Andrade and Paul Barritt, the principals of the British theater group 1927, and their co-director Barrie Kosky, and so precise the execution that all of this imagery is persuasive. The head of the soprano Erika Miklosa, singing the Queen of the Night’s stratospheric high notes, looks as if it’s been planted atop an enormous spider with writhing, piercing claws. The three boys who guide Papageno and the prince Tamino on their journey seem to pop out of a basket held aloft by enormous moths. The human performers, their faces painted silent-film white, don’t run the show here they are fitted into a fanciful vision of animation from the 1920s. Oh, I forgot to mention that, like everything in this “Magic Flute” besides the singers, the charming cat is merely a cartoon projected on a flat screen. LOS ANGELES - Who knew that the star of Mozart’s “The Magic Flute” could be a gangly black cat? In the Los Angeles Opera’s irresistible new production, which opened on Saturday at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion here, the mischievous bird catcher Papageno has traded feathers for a feline that leaps from tree to tree, fends off angry dogs and gets captured in a bell jar, radiating charisma all the while.