Operas are like buses. Both are filled with pensioners and take ages to get anywhere, but more importantly they always seem to arrive en masse. You wait ages for a Magic Flute, then five come along at once. Opera North started us off in January, Welsh National Opera and English National Opera are currently following suit, with Scottish Opera and Glyndebourne covering the summer shift. It’s a mess and, when you consider that at least four of these are touring with inevitable overlap, a wanton, self-destructive splitting of an already small opera-going audience.
With more Flutes than a school wind-band to choose from this season you can afford to be picky (assuming you haven’t already exhausted yourself with the three concurrent Katya Kabanovas). Among so many new productions Welsh National Opera’s 15-year-old revival doesn’t seem like an obvious winner. But if Dominic Cooke’s staging is no longer the glossiest in the pack, it has something neither of its current rivals can boast: warmth.
Mozart’s Flute is famously an opera stained with racism and chauvinism, and steeped in suspicious Masonic philosophy to boot.
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