| Date and venue | Title |
|---|---|
| 25-May-2013 Komische Oper Berlin | Komische Oper Berlin's Flute is indeed magic |
 Die Zauberflöte is a work whose outward simplicity masks internal complexity and even contradictions. Mozart’s music is childishly tuneful and yet reaches for the classically sublime; Emmanuel Schikaneder’s libretto alternates a magical quest story out of a German storybook with Masonic claptrap and secondhand Voltaire. For a children’s opera, its message occasionally goes off the rails; for Enlightenment philosophy it seems silly (and its treatment of race and gender hardly progressive).Read full review... | |
| 16-Apr-2013 Royal Opera House, Covent Garden | Die Zauberflöte at Covent Garden |
 How, I wonder, is it best for an opera company to treat a revival of a well-aired, well-liked, decent but not particularly radical production of a top ten opera? This was what the Royal Opera had to contend with in this season’s revival of David McVicar’s 2003 setting of Die Zauberflöte: many in the audience will have known every note of the opera, and several will have been thoroughly familiar with the production.
Read full review... | |
| 6-Apr-2013 Elgin Theatre | The Magic Flute as great musical comedy from Opera Atelier in Toronto |
 Opera Atelier espouses truth in advertising: The Magic Flute, they tell us, is a Singspiel in two acts. You can call it a play with songs, a musical comedy, even an operetta, but hardly an opera in the traditional sense. Call it what you will, this is Opera Atelier’s fourth production of the work in the last 22 years.
Read full review... | |
| 7-Feb-2013 Riverside Studios | The Magic Flute gets metatheatrical with the Merry Opera Company |
 Mozart’s original The Magic Flute is bizarre enough. The story of a prince and a bird-catcher’s journey to save a princess they’ve never met from a sinister quasi-Freemason who turns out to be alright, it is sufficiently packed full of great songs and good humour to have become an enduring repertory favourite – but that doesn’t mean it makes any sense. It doesn’t, really. It is a daft opera.
Read full review... | |
