
Watching and hearing a company of artists on the cusp of their own musical futures brought those values in Mozart’s sublime and ebullient score and Emanuel Schikaneder’s inventive if sometimes bulky libretto across the footlights in ways by turns spry and affecting, tender and tense.

In the first of two performances, this handsome and fluidly mounted production yielded a Magic Flute agleam with the rush of first love and the giddy allure of sex, the opaque and sometimes terrifying mysteries of the adult world, and the rites of passage that bridge innocence and experience. In a gratifying match of cast and content, the rising singers of San Francisco’s annual Merola Opera Program piped youthful fresh life into Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte on Thursday, Aug. Maggie Kinabrew as the Queen of the Night in Merola Opera Program’s The Magic Flute | Credit: Kristen Loken
