Mozart Group Returns With a Magical ‘Flute’

Last summer, Lucinda Carver and her Los Angeles Mozart Orchestra scored a solid musical hit on their end of a performance of Mozart’s “The Abduction From the Seraglio� at the John Anson Ford Amphitheatre. Building upon that experience, another Mozart opera, “The Magic Flute,� was tried there Saturday night, again in a concert performance, again with often ecstatically pleasing results.

With any luck, Mozart opera al fresco threatens to become a welcome tradition in Cahuenga Pass.

“The Magic Flute� is paradoxically an easier and more difficult challenge than “Seraglio.� You don’t have to work as hard to make an impression in “The Magic Flute� because Mozart’s level of musical inspiration is so much higher. On the other hand, the greater capacity for spiritual and emotional depth, coupled with those sudden shifts in mood and endearingly eccentric reversals of good and evil roles, make it tougher to pull off a great performance.

To Carver’s immense credit, she has a coherent conception about this opera--a fleet, joyful, lightly textured, rhythmically alive one--and the will and the means to carry it through consistently. She cares about the shape of each phrase; she gave the ensembles and Papageno’s arias a lilt that made you involuntarily tap your foot. The orchestra played marvelously, with meticulously etched detail that withstood the scrutiny of the multi-miked sound system.

If there was any flaw in this conception, it is that the more radiantly serious aspects of this score were untapped, compounded by some cuts in the score. Most damaging was the excision of Act II’s subdued opening March and Sarastro’s monologue, so that the act opened cold with Sarastro’s “O Isis und Osiris,� robbing this celestial aria of its motivation.

The text on hand was a shotgun fusion of stripped-down dialogue in English (with resulting holes in the continuity of the plot) and sung portions in German--and the staging was restricted to stock gestures and embraces, with few attempts to take advantage of the unusual outdoor setting.

Yet Carver had a fine ensemble cast at hand, and she frequently mouthed the words as they sang through body microphones. Jonathan Mack was a far more interesting and powerful Tamino than we often hear, blending beautifully with Camille King’s Pamina. Tod Fitzpatrick made a boyish, solidly-sung Papageno, definitely no clown, and Rebecca Sherburn easily made sense of the transition of the Queen of the Night from good to evil, along with hitting those ridiculous high Fs fearlessly and cleanly.

Ron Li-Paz had sufficient richness and weight for Sarastro’s arias; Nicholas Larson was a youthfully petulant Monostatos; some choral voices from Zephyr: Voices Unbound were recessed in the mix.

On the whole, a major company would be doing itself a favor if it airlifted this cast, conductor and orchestra into a full-blown production.