Criticissimo Joachim Kaiser writing in today's Sueddeutsche Zeitung turns
his sights on Achim Freyser's production of Mozart's Zauberfloete at the
Salzburg Festival, von Dohnanyi, conducting the VPO.  He reports that
Freyer has:

   ...reset this cheerfully naive but also mystical tale of humanity
   as that of a modern circus.  One senses in this brilliantly stormy
   performance that Achim Freyer as a painter and theater person possesses
   a center of gravity that is in pictures, costumes, balloon-trousered
   clowns, surrealistic but balky mega->bosoms, lightbulbs for animals'
   eyes, that sort of thing...  the music is not of interest.  Indeed,
   it suffers, right from the first act on, from what Freyer considers
   funny in Mozart, but also from the acoustics of the Salzburg Fair
   Hall into which this traditional Festival offering has been displaced
   from its customary setting in the Felsenreitschule.

Kaiser goes on to tell that this large, hangar-like structure that holds
about twice as many customers as the Felsereitschule, made the " Vienna
Philharmonic under Dohnanyi sound frequently dry, lacking of substance,
and superficial.  Frau Musika without a nether torso."

Kaiser does concede that the Zauberfloete does employ a sense of fun
borrowed from Schikaneder's sort of Volkstheater.  But Freyer's idea of
fun was by no means in consonace with this--not even in the sense of an
aggiornamento-- nor with Mozart's "noble simpliicity".  In other words, the
perf4romace in the Fair Hall seemed obtrusively contrived.  But Kaiser did
give high marks to baritione, Matthias Goerne, for his Papageno.  He also
noted that Laura Aikin delivered with astonishing ease all the notes in her
rendition of the Queen of the Night-- "but without supplying the dramatic
jstification for it."

Kaiser snapped off his 900-odd word review archly: "The public seemed
animated."

Denis Fodor
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