The Magic Flute review, Royal Opera House: Innovative production is ideal family fare for Christmas

David McVicar’s staging of Mozart’s iconic opera shines in its lighting and design

Aigul Khismatullina (Queen of the Night) and Anna Prohaska (Pamina) in ‘The Magic Flute’ (Camilla Greenwell)

There are a few opera productions that don’t grow stale, they just get better, and so it is with director David McVicar’s version of The Magic Flute. It was premiered two decades ago, and its own magic has, if anything, brightened with time.

But for that to happen it requires top-of-the-range soloists, and although in this revival not everyone on stage is in that category, the show currently boasts two astonishing performers – Aigul Khismnatullina, who hails from Tatarstan, as the Queen of the Night, and the Hungarian-Romanian baritone Gyula Orendt as Papageno. Khismnatullina’s singing deservedly brings the house down, with her pure coloratura, and her easy mastery of her notoriously exposed and stratospherically high second-act revenge aria: I’ve never heard that sung with such ice-cold perfection.

Orendt’s incarnation of the picaresque bird-catcher Papegeno offers fine singing, a feast of physical comedy, and an unusually dark characterisation of a figure often presented as a mere purveyor of slapstick. Orendt comes on with what looks like a mangy miniature ostrich, to whose unruliness he responds by stamping on its head: since we’ve been delighting in its bad behaviour, his sudden murderous violence comes as a shock. But he’s both a master-farceur, and a tumbler whose lightning pratfalls come so thick and fast, we scarcely have time to register them.