Fairy tale about evil good

It is worth saying that yes, for musical perfectionism in Mozart opera, you need to go to another Ural city - Perm. The “Magic Flute” of the Yekaterinburg Theater, whose premiere performances began a month ago, did not impress the perfectly debugged mechanism. The general ensemble kept in the turbulence zone, the soloists diverged with the orchestra, led by Ivo Meinen (the conductor Oliver von Dokhnanya had already left). At the same time, the troupe is strong, there are good voices in it: the Queen of the Night (Olga Vutiras) carefully took all her upper “fa”, Pamina (Olga Semenischeva) was cute and musical, Tamino (Kirill Matveev) held a party without subtleties, but loudly, Papageno (Dmitry Starodubov) coped with Mozart's humor, slightly worse than lord Mozartovskaya vocal ease.

With all this, the performance does not need to ask about the condescending attention of the public, he is all right with this. The work of the British director Daniel Slateer (who had previously worked with Russian singers thanks to collaboration with Vladimir Yurovsky at the Glaind Born festival) and the British artist Francis O'Connor, declared as “Steampank style”, does not allow me to get bored, yawn and think about something abstract. The action, as intelligibly stated as possible, leads to itself.

For this, quite radical, not always polite towards Mozart, but well -working measures are accepted. And the spectacular fantastic machinery, which makes up the "steampunk" scenery, is not even the most important. They sing in the performance in German, but the “Magic Flute” is a zingshpil, a play with singing, in fact a musical of Mozart time. And conversational dialogs - an insurmountable barrier for singers who do not own German - in the Yekaterinburg production not only occur in the native language of the audience, but also very overcripted and displayed.

The girl is sorry. But Mozart somehow does not.

The mysterious, multilayer and not very logical parable about Masons, the initiation and victory of good over evil straighten, becomes closer, clearer and tougher. And for even more clarity, it is supplemented by the brisk comics of the Yekaterinburg artist Alexander Cherepanov, incredibly fascinating for the target audience (6+). For the public, a slightly older is offered a luxurious booklet with articles stretching for several small dissertations, and a video lecture using AR - and QR codes. It is difficult to say how Mozart perceives it, but the audience perceives with a bang.

So. The pilot Tamino falls off by parachute from a hit aircraft. The unpleasant superman Zharastro with the features of the dictator is fighting with the king of the night, who, dying, leaves his inconsolable wife a magic flute and daughter Pamin. The queen of the night is burning with hatred only in the restless dream of her daughter, and she is a suffering woman. There is no comic old woman in the performance - no eijism. Instead, a girl with a mutilated face, which she is forced to hide under the mask. Tolerance is the path of papageno to his happiness. And the only right decision for Tamino with Pamina is the flight from Zarastro, which is forcefully drives the submissive electorate into a bright future (the performance turned out to be unexpectedly relevant on the eve of the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution), arranges cruel punitive operations (the monostatos after them walks on crutches) and, obsessed with the idea of ​​scientific progress, conducts no less brutal experiments on people.

In front of me sat a little princess in a white dress, white shoes and a white bow in her hair. During the test of fire, which the directors organized Tamino and Pamin with animated means, she squeaked and buried her mother in the shoulder. During the test of water - burst into the whole hall. I had to withdraw it in the lobby and soothe. The girl is sorry. But Mozart somehow does not. It seems that if the ensembles did not disperse, he would be even satisfied.