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[Met Performance] CID:351036

New Production

Die Zauberflöte
Metropolitan Opera House, Fri, October 8, 2004

Debut : L'ubica Vargicová, Kwangchul Youn, Anna Christy, Volker Vogel, Aiden Bowman, Jason Goldberg, Lev Pakman, Julia Welsh, Julie Taymor, Donald Holder, Michael Curry, Mark Dendy







Production photos of Die Zauberflöte by Ken Howard / Metropolitan Opera

FUNDING:
The production a gift from Mr. and Mrs. Henry R. Kravis.
Additional production gifts from John Van Meter, The Annenberg Foundation, Karen and Kevin Kennedy, Bill Rollnick and Nancy Ellison Rollnick, Mr. and Mrs. William R. Miller, Agnes Varis and Karl Leichtman and Mr. and Mrs. Ezra
K. Zilkha.

Review 1:

Review of Leighton Kerner in the January 2005 issue of OPERA NEWS

Taymor's direction of the Met's new "Die Zauberflöte" proclaimed that more is exuberantly more.

The Metropolitan Opera turned a brave new corner on October 8 with the first performance of Julie Taymor's company-debut production of Mozart's "Die Zauberflöte." Not since the late John Dexter invaded the house thirty-one years ago had the Met been given such a jolting but enlivening theatrical shake-up. Central to the new bravery is that, while Dexter at his best stripped the stage down to a powerful economy of decor and action, Taymor's direction and design (or codesign) of films, musical plays, Shakespeare, other classic drama and operas has consistently proclaimed that more is exuberantly more. Hers is a theater where walls dance and puppeteered birds, beasts and people disobey any no-fly rules.

Mind you, Taymor's Zauberflöte, an expansion on her staging for Florence's 1993 May Festival, isn't entirely flawless, but it is nevertheless not to be missed. Her apparent preference for wild inspiration rather than safe perfection rules the show. To be more precise, the [first] night's governance was shared, as it should have been, with conductor James Levine, who seems to have deepened and freshly highlighted his already established mastery of this wonder-filled score.

One suspects that Levine would have achieved what he did even with a less ambitious production - such as the Met's 1991 inflated-from-Glyndebourne Flute, whose main visual point was to exhibit politely David Hockney's gracefully monumental and quite beautiful scene-painting, or the company's 1967 Old-Russian dazzler, designed by Marc Chagall with enough (perhaps) vodka-fueled brilliance to lighten up stage director Günther Rennert's otherwise stodgy sense of Viennese humor. But facing what Taymor and her allies in "après-nous-le-déluge" stagecraft were up to, Maestro Levine must have felt self-commanded all the more to rethink every page of the score, and the [first]-night performance sounded as evidence.

Let's begin at the beginning. Russian set-designer George Tsypin, remembered happily by Met audiences for "The Gambler" and "War and Peace," if less fondly for "Benvenuto Cellini," has devised a glassy-plastic front curtain whose dozens of linked Masonic pyramids were illuminated when those famous E-flat-major chords (in three flats, of course, and in three positions) launched the overture. Mozart and librettist Emanuel Schikaneder were politically incorrect Masons - hence the musical prominence of the figure three - and Levine gave special airspace to set off that number.

The overture ended, the front curtain rose, and Tsypin's scenery went into action, swiveling and gliding throughout the evening, holding still only when Mozart's arias and ensembles demanded center-stage, or when the libretto called for a change of pace. Taymor's program note acknowledges her having become "obsessed with the image of the triangular

kaleidoscope as a perfect pyramidic vehicle to house the exterior and inner landscapes of "The Magic Flute" - all this aside from her evident consideration of the opera's pseudo-Egyptian locale, Masonic symbols, and so on. Tsypin has obliged her with circular inner stages, pyramids of various sizes (ancient Egypt, hurrah!), boxy compartments, transparent plastic lions for Sarastro's chariot, and enough air and floor space for almost everything, including beasts, birds and spirits, to prance and to fly about on the ends of long, thin poles manipulated by a hyperactive corps of black-leotarded, barely visible super-Bunraku puppeteers.

Despite all the surprises, you're not being tossed into a barrel of Americanized Eurotrash. For example, Tamino makes his first entrance in a Japanese costume, just as Schikaneder prescribed. None of the twenty-five or so previous "Zauberflöte" productions that I'd seen over six decades obeyed that stage direction. Another unusual but libretto-inspired stroke: the three boy-spirits who guide Tamino to Sarastro's temples, and later on prove adept at preventing the suicides of Pamina and Papageno, symbolize the wisdom attributed to them by the Queen of the Night's three Ladies by sporting delicate white beards.

In the production's first cast, tenor Matthew Polenzani, who has been progressing step by step in his seven-year Met career, did much cultivated justice to his biggest local assignment yet and delivered Tamino's "Dies Bildnis" and the role's other great passages with firm promise of further development. Soprano Dorothea Röschmann's Pamina, after a "Bei Männern" duet with Rodion Pogossov's Pagageno that needed more unhurried warmth (do we blame Levine's or Taymor's speedometer?), bloomed into an emotionally intense, vocally grand heroine. Whether persuading the scared Papageno to trust in "Die Wahrheit" (the truth), mourning a supposedly lost love ("Ach, ich fühl's," that aria-length tragedy in G minor) or describing, Wagner-style, her dead father's flute, which will take the lovers through their trials of fire and water, Röschmann gave us a Pamina to cherish.

Pogossov, one of the Met's younger baritones, replaced the previously announced, more seasoned, but indisposed Matthias Goerne in Schikaneder's own role as the bird-catching, lovelorn Papageno, singing with verve and lyricism. One can understand why the Korean basso cantante Kwangchul Youn, in his Met debut as Sarastro, has been acclaimed so intensely in Europe for his recorded Don Giovanni. His voice is exceptionally beautiful, but he didn't have that profondo substance Sarastro needs at the bottom of the bass clef. He reached those notes but didn't grasp them. He also neglected to express Sarastro's warmth to the lovers and fury toward his enemies.

The other debut singers included a sexy Hollywood starlet-like L'ubica Vargicova as a Queen of the Night with rhinestone top Fs, cute Anna Christy as a doll-like Papagena (whose old woman's cackle was actually more pleasing than her "real" voice) and Volker Vogel as a lively, lewd, and non-black Monostatos, for whom the racial jokes were removed.

Among the many veterans, Emily Pulley, Jossie Pérez and Wendy White sang the Three Ladies' witty music beautifully; Aiden Bowman, Jason Goldberg and Lev Pakman were in fine tune as the bearded boys; Garrett Sorenson and Morris Robinson sang their Bachian chorale sternly in what looked like welded armor (beneath gigantic puppets of themselves); and the orchestra's Michael Parloff played Tamino's flute solos in streams of mellow sound. As for Raymond Hughes's chorus, the men thrilled us with the sweet thunder of "O Isis end Osiris, welche Wonne," and the full chorus sang its final scene with what seemed a new freedom of phrasing without getting sloppy.

Further production credits go to Donald Holder for his virtuoso lighting, Michael Curry as codesigner (with Taymor) of the puppets, Mark Dendy for the choreography, and Taymor again for her mask designs. About those masks: the Three Ladies might have been given more attractive ones (atop their heads) to suit their music, and the old woman Papagena's could have been less horrible. Papageno might have put off this cackler by suggesting a pub-date at the Sign of the Rising Gorge. At any rate, don't let these reservations or those noted above keep you away from this groundbreaking vision of one of the greatest of all operas. It returns to the Met in April.

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Met careers

• James Levine [Conductor]
• Dorothea Röschmann [Pamina]
• Matthew Polenzani [Tamino]
• L'ubica Vargicová [Queen of the Night]
• Kwangchul Youn [Sarastro]
• Rodion Pogossov [Papageno]
• Anna Christy [Papagena]
• Volker Vogel [Monostatos]
• Julien Robbins [Speaker]
• Emily Pulley [First Lady]
• Jossie Pérez [Second Lady]
• Wendy White [Third Lady]
• Aiden Bowman [Genie]
• Jason Goldberg [Genie]
• Lev Pakman [Genie]
• James Courtney [Priest]
• Bernard Fitch [Priest]
• Garrett Sorenson [Guard]
• Morris Robinson [Guard]
• Roger Andrews [Slave]
• Dennis Williams [Slave]
• Glenn Bater [Slave]
• Julia Welsh [Dancer]
• Julie Taymor [Production/Costume Designer/Puppet Designer]
• George Tsypin [Set Designer]
• Donald Holder [Lighting Designer]
• Michael Curry [Puppet Designer]
• Mark Dendy [Choreographer]