by Daniel Hathaway

CIM Opera Theater director David Bamberger has chosen Mozart’s The Magic Flute for its fall production in Kulas Hall at the Cleveland Institute of Music, which runs from Wednesday, November 6 through Saturday, November 9, with a 7:30 pm curtain time each night. The production is double-cast (Wednesday-Friday and Thursday-Saturday) and will be sung in the original German with English supertitles.

Weighed down by enough symbolism to give Dan Brown material for a thick new book, Flute also calls for a stratospheric (and scary) soprano to play the Queen of the Night, a basso profundo to play Sarastro and a charismatic baritone to play the birdcatcher, Papageno. We reached David Bamberger by telephone last week to talk about the production. He began by musing about the character of the evil sorcerer, Sarastro.

David Bamberger: I have a big problem with Sarastro. I know that Shaw said his music sounds the way God ought to sound, but everything he actually says, if you go by the words rather than the tunes, is actually untrue. Or inept. [Read more…]