The Magic Flute – assured, atmospheric and loads of enjoyable | Opera

The orbs have been re-lit and the falcon booked, the monumental masonry slotted again into place and the flying contraption (half Wright brothers prototype, half Victorian perambulator) commandeered by one other three boys. Twenty two years since its debut, with revivals now in double figures, David McVicar’s manufacturing of The Magic Flute is again, overseen by revival director Ruth Knight.

The lighting is as lovely as ever: there’s no mistaking the Enlightenment’s visible metaphors right here. Notwithstanding a technical hitch that delayed the beginning of act two on opening evening, the opera’s sequence of mysterious non-places glides alongside, dreamlike and atmospheric. The opera has lengthy outlived its genre of Singspiel – a sort of 18th-century musical – and its edutainment moralising unavoidably harks again to a different age. Whether you agree with the programme that an opera insisting that ladies all the time want male steering is “very suitable for children” will rely in your parenting type. But it’s onerous to think about the plot making extra sense within the twenty first century than it does in McVicar’s palms.

This revival can be loads of enjoyable, weaving a significant thread of panto-ready bodily comedy via the earnest classes of Sarastro and his pseudo-masonic initiates. The German dialogue is so fluently delivered you’ll overlook the absurdity of a London viewers listening to a non-German forged chattering auf Deutsch. The opera’s “noble” couple of Tamino and Pamina could be a bore – all head prefect goody-goody – however Amitai Pati and Lucy Crowe had been far too vivacious for that. Crowe sparkled from the get-go, her tone heat, her phrasing exquisitely managed. Pati (the brother of acclaimed Samoan-born tenor Pene) gleamed heroically up prime but blended sensitively within the varied ensembles: a particularly advantageous Royal Opera debut.

Huw Montague Rendall is a born Papageno, sympathetic as he struts and strops, his singing simple, his comedian timing acute. Gerhard Siegel’s Monostatos (the character stripped of its most express racism) was a completely kitsch baddie, whereas Kathryn Lewek was a comparatively un-histrionic Queen of the Night, her soprano steely and laser-accurate, the leaps of her most well-known aria ringing out, bell-like. As Sarastro, Soloman Howard had simple authority, his excessive register luxurious, his lowest notes dense velvet. The three boys boasted distinctive intonation and angelic tone; the three women agile, luminous ensemble singing.

Holding all of it along with an completely musical, completely assured sense of tempo, was younger French conductor Marie Jacquot. She drew ultra-stylish enjoying from the orchestra: tutti heft remained translucent, chorale passages had been sublimely well-tuned, solos artfully sculpted. At one level her hand shot up, releasing the top of a phrase as if she’d been greedy it in her fist, such was her intimate involvement with the music. Remember Jacquot’s title: this Royal Opera debut suggests we’ll be needing it.