Adelaide Festival announces 2019 centrepiece: The Magic Flute

Kosky, who was the Adelaide Festival director in 1996, returns to the festival for the second time in three years after Saul wowed audiences in 2017.  The Magic Flute, which Kosky directs with Suzanne Andrade (from British performance company 1927), blends animation with live performance for a production that has the look of Nosferatu meets Tim Burton and Buster Keaton. The Komische Oper Berlin production has played to more than half-a-million people in the northern hemisphere since premiering in Berlin in 2012.

“Mozart wrote The Magic Flute as an entertainment and that is where this Kosky/Andrade production succeeds so spectacularly,” says Adelaide Festival co-director Rachel Healy in a press release. “Back in 2016, I saw their Magic Flute in the middle of a full-to-bursting theatre with every audience member wearing mile-wide grins, and I knew that we had to find a way of presenting it at the Adelaide Festival. The production captures the spirited warmth of the original with a masterful application of 21st century technology.”

This will be the third year in a row an opera has been a centrepiece of the Adelaide Festival, as co-directors Rachel Healy and Neil Armfield programmed Glyndebourne Opera’s Saul and Hamlet in 2017 and 2018 respectively.

Armfield says The Magic Flute will appeal to “young audiences and opera first-timers, while also attracting seasoned opera lovers who know that the production values and musicianship of Berlin’s Komische Oper is of the highest possible standard”.

The full Adelaide Festival program will be announced in October.

The Magic Flute
March 1 -March 3
Festival Theatre
Tickets

Adelaide Festival runs from Friday, March 1 to Sunday, March 17

View the full program at adelaidefestival.com.au

Header image:
Photographer: Iko Freese