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Music Opera Theatre

The Magic Flute has never made more cartoonish sense - an Edinburgh Festival roundup

Plus: a misguided attempt to adapt Alasdair Gray’s sci-fi epic, Lanark, for the stage and a superb concert from the Zehetmair Quartet

5 September 2015

9:00 AM

5 September 2015

9:00 AM

The Magic Flute

Festival Theatre

Lanark: A Life in Three Acts

Lyceum Theatre

Zehetmair Quartet

Queen’s Hall

London may cry foul over Hamlet’s misplaced to-be-ing and not-to-be-ing but Edinburgh is in raptures over a Magic Flute which ditches its spoken dialogue entirely. Directed by Barrie Kosky and Suzanne Andrade, and first seen a couple of years ago on Kosky’s adopted home turf at the Berlin Comic Opera, the production turns Mozart and Schikaneder’s beloved singspiel into a sing-stumm, in which silent-movie captions and moon-faced gazes replace the original spiel, underscored by fortepiano improvisations with a spot of Chinese opera thrown in for good measure.

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