Opera Scotland

Zauberflöte 2025Royal Conservatoire of Scotland

Read more about the opera Magic Flute

Mozart's late masterpiece is an excellent vehicle for a substantial team of well-trained students.  For the most part this was a highly satisfying performance from the purely musical viewpoint.  First credit should go to the excellent student orchestra under Matthew Kofi Waldren - everything beautifully phrased.

The solo singers projected clearly. The two extreme voices, Joshua McCullough (low) and Anna Marmion (high) as Sarastro and Queen, both coped with ease.  She is also credited as one of the highly successful German language coaches. Fraser Robinson was an excellent Papageno, with the audience eating out of his hand. The Pamina, Stephanie Wong, was a generally sweet-toned Pamina.  At the third performance, Aidan Thomas Phillips was a more dramatically voiced Prince than we usually hear, and he did have some less than ideally lyrical high notes.

The three ladies made an excellent team - this was the first time we had seen the second lady doubling as Papagena. Whether this was ideal dramatically is questionable - after all, by the time Papagena appears the ladies have been revealed as 'baddies', so there was a possibility of confusion.  The other roles - boys priests and armed men, all did well.

The staging by Jim Manganello was generally acceptable - perhaps the plain grey set combined with dark lounge suits for the chorus and most of the soloists was visually rather monotonous.  Was there an intended link to Freemasonry than was otherwise ignored?

There was one drawback with the whole enterprise, and the presence in the production credits of a 'Sound Designer' is a bit of a giveaway.  The first obvious indication of amplification came with the Speaker's interogation of Tamino.  After the interval things got much worse, beginning with extremely loud thunder effects.  The problem was simply that the Athenaeum is a small theatre and operatic voices are not designed for amplification - certainly not Mozart.  The result was exhausting to listen to - not something that should be repeated.