| Francisco Araiza as Tamino First Lady--Juliana Gondek Second Lady--Mimi Lerner Third Lady--Judith Christin Tho the great performer is the conductor and orchestra! And I'm so used to hearing this after the overture, I just had to post it too. This production was designed by David Hockney. "Die Zauberflöte is a rescue opera in which the hero arrives on the scene himself crying for help, trembling in fear, and fainting dead away. "Help! Help! Or else I am lost! . . . Ah, save me!"--this is a strange text for a chivalric hero. He has a bow but no arrows, yet despite his defenselessness he is chosen as the perfect knight, now armed with only a magic flute, to rescue Pamina. It is not Prince Tamino but the timorous bird catcher Papageno who twice saves Pamina from rape; and it is Papgeno not Tamino who sings the great love duet with her, "Bei Männern, welche Liebe fühlen." An old crone says her age is eighteen years and two minutes; she turns out to be Papagena. The unpreparedness of these reversals, improbabilities, unmaskings, and remaskings is what is so startling, like turning over a card, switching a lamp on and off, changing light into darkness and back again. Appropriately, the overarching design of the opera embodies the transition from star-flaming night to brilliant sun" ----Maynard Solomon: "Mozart A Life". 1995 on the Late Mimi Lerner, from the Boston Globe: Mimi Lerner, an internationally renowned mezzo-soprano and educator who came to the operatic stage late in ... |
