Flute and veg

Die Zauberflöte - Felsenreitschule, 30 July 2012 (Salzburg Festival)

If you could sum up the Salzburg Festival in one word, it would be 'quality'. Ticket buyers stump up vast sums in the expectation they will hear the world's best musicians playing the greatest music ever written in immaculately conceived and presented performances. Leave the merely 'promising' to others.

So while there's nothing hugely wrong with this Magic Flute, its ordinariness comes as a disappointment. Staffed largely by new Intendant Alexander Pereira's old Zurich Opera cronies, it has all the bland efficiency of the Swiss rail network.

Jens-Daniel Herzog's well-crafted production makes intelligent use of the vast open Felsenreitschule stage. A configuration of sliding rooms and arches coordinates with the venue's own arched and niched walls. The restless changes of scenery give a real sense of journey. But the schoolroom/science lab setting is just decoration, the colourful costumes and gesticulation merely family-friendly. Perversely, the production suddenly bursts into life in its final moments, when the Queen of the Night wrestles Sarastro for his sun-medallion. But it has nothing new to say about the work, and not enough visual imagination to compensate.

I admire Nikolaus Harnoncourt's breathless recording of Die Entführung, but he slowed the clock this time round. His period instrument Concentus Musicus Wien played efficiently, but dragging tempi and arbitrary pauses inhibited any real connection with the work. It seemed an empty and dehumanised experiment, like the constant note-taking of Sarastro's lab-coated initiates. Spoken lines, uncut and languidly enunciated, were even more interminable than usual.

Casting was not top drawer. The profoundly sonorous Georg Zeppenfeld is probably the best Sarastro south of Rene Pape, so no complaints on that score. The Three Boys, drawn from the Tölzer Knaben choir, were perfect in their wizened old man makeup.

The rest did the job without ever convincing they were the best choice for it. Bernard Richter sang Tamino more strongly than anyone else I've heard recently, though his presence doesn't register with the same force as his voice. Markus Werba's Papageno lapsed into declamatory barking too often for comfort and was frankly not as funny as someone with that many good lines should be. Rudolf Schasching as Monostatos preferred shouting to singing. The women were almost interchangeably anonymous.

How hard can it be to cast a Magic Flute? This bunch were more than adequate - in a fine choice for a Zurich Wiederaufnahme sort of a way. But with audiences travelling across the world and ticket prices for this show topping €400, Salzburg demands more.