This is the third time Opera Australia have staged Julie Taymor’s interpretation of Mozart’s masonic masterpiece (directed this time by Matthew Barclay) since it first graced the stage of the Sydney Opera House’s Joan Sutherland Theatre in 2012. This speaks volumes about the charisma, charm and accessibility that this production, created in 2005 for New York’s Metropolitan Opera, offers in spades.

Vocally Opera Australia has assembled a skilled cast featuring a great deal of home-grown talent, with only Scottish tenor John Longmuir in the role of Tamino born outside Australia (although he has made his home and career down-under for many years). Longmuir’s robust yet agile singing is sensitively paired with Taryn Fiebig’s sweet soprano in the role of Pamina. Both have a buoyant and crisp tone that is ideal for Mozart although Fiebig occasionally reveals some slight fragility at the higher end of her range. Sian Pendry, Dominica Matthews and Jane Ede’s Three Ladies were also perfectly matched, and despite the troublesome wordiness of these roles, their diction and intonation were superb. Kanen Breen did what he could with Monostatos, a role that sits in a rather unflattering range of any tenor’s voice, although his suitably pantomimey antics made...