Christmas Day at the Thailand Cultural Centre saw the opening night of Opera Siam's wonderful new production of Mozart's The Magic Flute, conducted by the young Thai impresario Trisdee Na Patalung and directed by Somtow Sucharitkul (there were two further performances, one sponsored by the Bangkok Metropolitan Authority).
Monique Klongtruadroke as Queen of the Night and Nadlada Thamtanakom as Pamina in The Magic Flute.
What Opera Siam achieves with very limited financial resources and rehearsal time is truly incredible. Their production not only reached but exceeded the standard of a typical European opera company. What could they achieve if they had similar resources?
The Magic Flute is an extraordinary opera, combining some of Mozart's most sublimely beautiful and profound music, with an absurd plot, and plenty of comic dialogue. Mozart's librettist, Schikaneder, played the part of the bird-catcher Papageno in the original 1791 production and wrote a big comic part for himself. Somtow imaginatively reconciles the seemingly inexplicable contradictions of the plot by seeing the potential for both good and evil in all of us, at least within our imaginings.
Somtow presents the opera as a fantasy which a group of ordinary people jointly entertain. They appear first, during the overture, in their everyday clothes, working in an office, and, in mime, an argument develops between them. Then, as Act I starts, they are transformed into their fantasy avatars — princes, princesses, priests and so on. In the course of the opera they work through, and eventually reconcile, their petty quarrels so that friendship and love eventually triumph.
There were many Thai touches: in the sumptuous costumes (designer Natthawan Santiphap), in the comic dialogue and in the gender-bending casting. One of the three ladies who attend the Queen of the Night was played (in the first two performances) by a man, and the three boys, who guide and advise the main characters through their ordeals were two boys and a girl. And, at the final performance, Papagena — a soprano role — was hilariously acted, and strongly sung, by transgender JC Manar Kaewtae. Surely a world first! Only in Thailand.
The opera was sung in the original German, with the spoken dialogue an amusing mixture of English and Thai. There were surtitles, in English, Thai and Japanese, but these sometimes got out of phase and appeared too early, and, in their English version, employed a weirdly old-fashioned translation; for example: "To your goal leads this road, still you must, young one, manly win."
The international cast made an impressive ensemble. The Mexican/German Emilio Pons as Prince Tamino, was a clear and ringing, rather Italianate, tenor with great emotional expressiveness and dynamics. Mozart wrote the music with specific singers in mind, which has created problems for many subsequent performers because of the extraordinary range involved. In particular, the Queen of the Night's second great coloratura aria reaches a rarely sung top F. And at the other end, Sarastro has to descend to an F four octaves below that. The Australian Damian Whiteley has the powerful and generous deep bass voice necessary for Sarastro, while Italian/Thai Monique Klongtruadroke as Queen of the Night looked terrific (think Cruella de Vil in 101 Dalmatians), and sang her two famously fiendish arias effortlessly, hitting those top Fs with élan. The Swedish bass-baritone Dag Schantz was a sonorous priest.
The two outstanding performances of the evening came from the German baritone Falko Hönisch, and the young Thai soprano Nadlada Thamtanakom. Hönisch gave a hugely energetic performance as the bird-catcher Papageno and sang strongly and pleasingly. Schikaneder would surely have approved. The scenes between him and Papagena (Areeya Rotjanadit on the first two nights and JC Manar on the final night), the "bird" who eventually captures the bird-catcher, were the comic highlights, enlivened at the end by their rapidly increasing family of tiny Papagenos and Papagenas, cutely played with huge enthusiasm and flapping of wings by 14 young children.
Nadlada was the Princess Pamina, whom Prince Tamina, after trials and tribulations, eventually wins. Here Nadlada was a radiantly beautiful fairy-tale princess, and she sang with great purity of tone and with deeply affecting lyrical warmth. This was a breakthrough performance for the Thai singer who's now singing professionally in Belgium. Here is someone who is surely destined for a great career.
In the end, it was the appropriately magical music of Mozart that won through in this most glorious opera. Trisdee achieved miracles with the very young orchestra, in a performance of great sensitivity and warmth, bringing out the sublime nature of Mozart's amazing score.
Michael Proudfoot is a British writer on opera and a former Head of the School of Humanities at the University of Reading.
Falko Hönisch, left, as Papageno in a scene that also features an elephant.
