Stylish Zauberflöte returns to London’s Royal Opera House

It will soon be 20 years since David McVicar’s production of Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte was first seen at the Royal Opera. Its longevity proves what a good investment a production can be if it avoids strong opinions about the opera in question and looks straightforward but stylish.

It also helps that, back in 2003, McVicar airbrushed out the racist comments in the text, turning evil Monostatos, identified as a “Moor”, into a comic, bewigged, 18th-century fop. The sexist attitudes are more difficult to erase and those remain, to garner semi-guilty giggles among the audience.

Overall, this is a slick, well-balanced show that addresses Enlightenment philosophy and pantomime humour in equal measure. It has already hosted multiple casts and is now getting three more over a run of 14 performances, lasting to the end of January.

The present line-up excels at the top and bottom of the vocal spectrum. Aigul Khismatullina unleashes top notes of blazing power as Queen of the Night and Brindley Sherratt plumbs the depths of Sarastro’s arias with sonorous gravity. Anna Prohaska and Filipe Manu make an attractive, young leading couple as Pamina and Tamino, the tenor with a nice warmth of voice. Gyula Orendt plays Papageno, the opera’s “everyman”, straight down the line as an amicable, ordinary guy in a far-from-ordinary magical world. They may be glad of the snappy articulation and clarity that conductor Maxim Emelyanychev brings with him from working with period instruments, but there is a lack of musical warmth in his performance.

★★★☆☆

To January 28, roh.org.uk

A regular cry goes up around this time of the year for music that is not about Christmas. Simon Rattle and the London Symphony Orchestra clearly took that to heart when they planned Saturday’s all-choral concert. Pairing Szymanowski’s setting of the mournful Stabat Mater with Brahms’s Ein deutsches Requiem, derided by Bernard Shaw as the work of “a first-class undertaker”, was hardly going to set the seasonal sleigh-bells tinkling.

On paper, the programme looked indigestible, though it proved more palatable in practice. The primary strength of the performances came from Rattle himself, who has long championed both works, the Szymanowski from his days in Birmingham, and the Brahms during his tenure with the Berlin Philharmonic, with whom he made a first-class recording.

Among settings of the Stabat Mater, the one by Szymanowski is an outlier, exotic and sensual. Rattle gave it space and luxuriant textures courtesy of the LSO; Iwona Sobotka was an outstanding soprano soloist. The mezzo and baritone soloists, Hanna Hipp and Florian Boesch, were able in their lesser roles.

Rattle’s performance of the Brahms was a little swifter, less monumentally refulgent than his recording, but it still had gravity and deep-toned richness to spare. Although the Barbican acoustic is better than it used to be, it is still unhelpful for choirs, and despite thorough rehearsal the London Symphony Chorus sounded tentative in exposed passages. Sobotka’s rich soprano was less well suited here. Boesch set about the German texts with positively biblical fire, but the more consoling music eluded him. This was in all senses Rattle’s evening.

★★★☆☆

barbican.org.uk