<<  -- 3 --  Roderic Dunnett    VISIONS OF THE SUBLIME

McVicar probes, he homes in, he diverts, he teases. Macfarlane's opening gambit -- a clutch of mock-masonic mystery doors, prismic shapes and curious cones and rhomboids, is like the start of some kind of spiritual whodunnit.

The colours come and go in bold splashes -- blues and greys and yellows, reds for Franz Josef Selig's youthful but purposeful Sarastro (doubling with Alfred Reiter) and occasionally Adrian Thompson's unusually impertinent, dapper Monostatos -- no Caliban he, but a mincing escapee from some divertissement of Louis XIII and Lully a century earlier. Even an intrusive mobile phone (in tune, luckily) sounded merely like another of Papageno's musical contraptions.

In Schikaneder's day (or Henry Bishop's, in London) they went in for contraptions galore. The boa constrictor of a monster -- McVicar aping Richard Jones? -- is pure outrageous entertainment; so is the heron -- Papageno's Doppelganger, a kind of stork-on-a-stalk looking suspiciously like an escapee from Wallace and Gromit - which dances for the bird-catcher's opening Vogelsang (after he emerges like a mole from a hole, pure Wind-in-the-Willows) and acquires a cheeky will of its own.

This production, conducted initially by Sir Colin Davis, taken over by Covent Garden's admirable Head of Music, David Syrus, and overseen in the June-July series by Swiss conductor Philippe Jordan (who has his hands full with the celebrations of Graz's year as sole European City of Culture) never ceases to awe visually : Macfarlane's dominant sun and crescent moon (and all-knowing eye-in-the-sky) pound home the image of good versus bad, wise in opposition to foolish, sophisticated and loutish, enlightened against ill-versed, reason against passion, male and female, the initiate weighed against the profane.

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