★★★★

There would have been easier places for the Scottish Chamber Orchestra and Principal Conductor Maxim Emelyanychev to begin a planned series of annual concert performances of Mozart’s operas at the Edinburgh International Festival than the composer’s weird masonic “Singspiel” The Magic Flute. Many a fully-staged production of its odd mix of fairytale, ritual and daft comedy has failed to make the transition from directorial concept to theatrical success.

This one had the sort of luxury casting the Festival can be relied upon to provide with Elizabeth Watts, Catriona Morison and Claudia Huckle a beautifully balanced trio as the Three Ladies, Brindley Sherratt a stately sonorous Sarastro, and the stratospheric notes of Kathryn Lewek – delivered with almost absurdly casual aplomb – demonstrating why she is the current go-to Queen of the Night.

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While the cast sang in German from memory, the spoken text was a new English translation by Sir David Pountney, read by a duo of German bass-baritone Thomas Quastoff and Scots actor Neil John Gibson. Starting out in the voice of Mozart’s librettist Emanuel Schikaneder, they adopted many characters, with changes of tone and pitch as the narration unfolded, Gibson regularly mirroring the character of Papageno, sung with engaging performative style by Hungarian baritone Gyula Orendt.

Whether the device, with its local references and pantomime touches and occasional breaking of the “fourth wall”, made the plot easier to follow is debatable, but the audience certainly found the double-act engaging.

Of course it is not the story but the music that is the reason to do The Magic Flute. That was in the enthusiastic and energetic hands of Emelyanychev, who was not only all over every detail of the orchestral scoring, from first flute Andre Cebrian to timpanist Louise Lewis Goodwin on thunder-sheet, but cued the entries of the soloists and vocal ensembles and provided crucial ornamented keyboard on a small stage-centre celesta at the climax of the work.

It may be exhausting watching the young Russian conductor at work, but the results speak for themselves. Here that included a focus on the SCO Chorus, sharing the organ gallery seating with members of a capacity audience, whose contributions were a reminder that the score is contemporaneous with Mozart’s Requiem and had a grandeur rarely heard in few staged Magic Flutes. The most opaque of the masonic gobbledegook in the piece is surrounded by some of the loveliest music in the score, and Emelyanychev made sure that it was heard to best advantage.